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THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

SIXTH EDITION

Jam es West Davidson

Mark Hamilton Lytle
Bard College

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, James West.

After the fact :the art of historical detection IJames WestDavidson, Mark Lytle. �th ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13:978-0-07-729268-3 (v. 1 :acid-free paper)
ISBN-10:0-07-729268-5 (v. 1 :acid-free paper)
1. United States-Historiography. 2. United States-History. L Lytle, Mark: H. Il. Title.
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About the Authors

]AMES WEST DAVIDSON received his PhD from Yale University. A histo­
rian who has pursued a full-time writing career, he is the author of numer­
ous books, among them The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century
New England and Great Heart: The History ofa Labrador Adventure (with John
Rugge). He is coeditor, with Michael Stoff, of the Oxford New Narratives in
American History, in which his own most recent book appears, "They Say":
Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction ofRace.

MARK H . LYTLE, a PhD from Yale University, is Professor of History

and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Bard College. He has
served two years as Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at
University College Dublin, in Ireland. His publications include The Origins
ofthe Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953, America's Uncivil Wars: The Six­
ties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, and most recently, The Gentle
Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise ofthe Environmental Move­
ment. He recently coedited a joint issue of the journals Diplomatic History and
Environmental History dedicated to the field of environmental diplomacy.

v
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Preface

We began this book more than a quarter century ago with an introduction­
still there, if you turn the page-which compares the process of doing history
to deciphering the tales hidden in the tree rings of a newly felled hemlock.
The dust jacket to the first edition even included an authors' photo of the
two of us in front of such a stump, looking very young, very hirsute, and
vaguely disreputable. (This was the 1970s, by way of historical context.)
The sixth edition finds us quantitatively less hirsute, but the book cer­
tainly has gained foliage, having accumulated nearly as much of a history
as the old hemlock in our introduction. The first edition of After the Fact
contained thirteen chapters; the recent fifth edition boasted seventeen, not
counting an additional three chapters that have been retired over the years.
History may be the past, but its writing moves ahead. We decided that for
this edition, we needed to focus on pruning and shaping as well as adding
and revising.
We went over each of the existing chapters with an eye to streamlining
the narrative, making it more accessible, and eliminating unnecessary detail,
without compromising our portrayal of the often messy process of histori­
cal detection. The result is that most chapters are shorter and, we believe,
more engaging and readable. As in previous editions, we have added two new
chapters, as well as rewritten an old one, but the total number remains at
seventeen. They progress in chronological order through American history.
"Contact," our new Chapter 1, uses the De Soto expedition of 1539-1543
to examine the difficulties of reconstructing the contested ground of first
contact, and the need to take a broader ecological perspective. The progress
made by archaeologists over the past few decades allows us to see better
some of the remarkable transformations sparked by the De Soto entrada,
as well as the meeting of Europeans and first Americans more generally.
This chapter replaces our previous essay on ecological history, "The Invis­
ible Pioneers." While the new chapter incorporates some material from the
original chapter, it also demonstrates how new scholarship has turned other
parts of the story nearly upside down.

X1
Xll PREFACE

"Sitting-In," our new Chapter 15, uses the early years of the civil rights
struggle to examine how and why broad social movements emerge when and
where they do. The lunch-counter demonstrations at Greensboro in 1960
appeared to be a spontaneous event, which then spread like wildfire. Why
did the sit-ins in Greensboro trigger this outburst of activism when ear­
lier demonstrations did not? Was Greensboro really spontaneous, as many
observers and historians first thought? And does the response to it support
the notion that discontinuity rather than continuity defines the process of
change over time?
"The Madness of John Brown," Chapter 7, still asks the same question:
"Was John Brown insane?" But it employs dynamic psychology rather than
psychoanalytic theory to reach a similar conclusion. In times of political
upheaval "it's hard to tell who's mad."
Finally, we have included a new feature periodically throughout the text,
"Past and Present." In it we make connections between the topics on which
we practice detective work from the past with present-day issues or themes
worthy of further examination.
Besides streamlining and adding new material, we have made our inter­
active Weh site the place where ancillary materials are now available. The
Primary Source Investigator (PSI), previously supplied on CD-ROM, is
redesigned and now online. There you will find additional documents and
images, as well as chapters from previous editions, including "The 'Nable
Savage' and the Artist's Canvas," "Huey Generis," "Instant Watergate," and
"The Body in Question." The Research and Writing Center, also found on
PSI, will assist students in a range of skills, from time management to con­
ducting their own research and producing quality papers.
Meantime, we owe thanks to those who helped with revisions to this
edition. For reviews of this book and for assistance on one or both of our
new chapters, we would like to thank Amelia Dees-Killette, Coastal Caro­
lina Community College; Andrew Eugene Barnes, Arizona State Univer­
sity; Angela M. Payne, University of Arkansas; Angela T. Thompson, East
Carolina University; Ann F. Ramenofsky, University of New Mexico; Car­
men V. Harris, University of South Carolina-Upstate; Kenneth Millen­
Penn, Fairmont State University; Mario A. Perez, Crafton Hills College;
Marlon Mowdy, Hampton Archaeological Museum State Park, Wilson,
Arkansas; Martin B. Cohen (retired), George Mason University; Nancy
Mitchell, North Carolina State University; Natalie Graham, University
of Florida; Raymond Nathan Wilson, University of Tulsa; W. Frederick
Limp, University of Arkansas.
We also have benefited from the assistance of the editorial team at
McGraw-Hill, including Nicole Bridge and Denise Wright. As always,
we appreciate the enthusiasm of our readers and are pleased to receive any
advice, corrections, or comments on this new edition.
Introduction

This book began as an attempt to bring more life to the reading and learn­
ing of history. As practicing historians, we have been troubled by a grow­
ing disinterest in or even animosity toward the study of the past. How is it
that when we and other historians have found so much that excites curios­
ity, other people find history irrelevant and boring? Perhaps, we thought,
if lay readers and students understood better how historians go about their
work-how they examine evidence, how they pose questions, and how they
reach answers-history would engage them as it does us.
As often happens, it took a mundane event to focus and clarify our preoc­
cupations. One day while working on another project, we went outside to
watch a neighboring farmer cut down a large old hemlock that had become
diseased. As his saw cut deeper into the tree, we joked that it had now bit
into history as far back as the Depression. "Depression?" grunted our friend.
"I thought you fellas were historians. I'm deep enough now so's Hoover
wasn't even a gleam in his father's eye."
With the tree down, the three of us examined the stump. Our woodcutter
surprised us with what he saw.
"Here's when my folks moved into this place," he said, pointing to a
ring. "1922."
"How do you know without counting the rings?" we asked.
"Oh, well," he said, as if the answer were obvious. "Look at the core, here.
The rings are all bunched up tight. I bet there's sixty or seventy-and all
within a couple inches. Those came when the place was still forest. Then,
you notice, the rings start getting fatter all of a sudden. That's when my dad
cleared behind the house-in '22-and the tree started getting a lot more
light. And look further out, here-see how the rings set together again for a
couple years? That's from loopers."
"Loopers?" we asked cautiously.
"Sure-loopers. You know. The ones with only front legs and back." His
hand imitated a looping, hopping crawl across the log. "Inchworms. They
damn near killed the tree. That was sometime after the war-'49 or '50." As

Xlll
XlV INTRODUCTION

his fingers traced back and forth among the concentric circles, he spoke of
other events from years gone by. Before we returned home, we had learned
a good deal about past doings in the area.
Now it occurs to us that our neighbor had a pretty good knack for put­
ting together history. The evidence of the past, like the tree rings, comes
easily enough to hand. But we still need to be taught how to see it, read it,
and explain it before it can be turned into a story. Even more to the point,
the explanations and interpretations behind the story often turn out to be
as interesting as the story itself. After all, the fascination in our neighbor's
account came from the way he traced his tale out of those silent tree rings.
Unfortunately, most readers first encounter history in schoolbooks, and
these omit the explanations and interpretations-the detective work, if you
will. Textbooks, by their nature, seek to summarize knowledge. They have
little space for looking at how that knowledge was gained. Yet the challenge
of doing history, not j ust reading it, is what attracts so many historians.
Couldn't some of that challenge be communicated in a concrete way? That
was our first goal.
We also felt that the writing of history has suffered in recent years
because some historians have been overly eager to convert their discipline
into an unadulterated social science. Undeniably, history would lose much
of its claim to contemporary relevance without the methods and theories
it has borrowed from anthropology, psychology, political science, econom­
ics, sociology, and other fields. Indeed, such theories make an important
contribution to these pages. Yet history is rooted in the narrative tradition.
As much as it seeks to generalize from past events, as do the sciences, it also
remains dedicated to capturing the uniqueness of a situation. When histo­
rians neglect the literary aspect of their discipline-when they forget that
good history begins with a good story-they risk losing that wider audi­
ence that all great historians have addressed. They end up, sadly, talking to
themselves.
Our second goal, then, was to discuss the methods of American historians
in a way that would give proper due to both the humanistic and scientific
sides of history. In taking this approach, we have tried to examine many of
the methodologies that allow historians to unearth new evidence or to shed
new light on old issues. At the same time, we selected topics that we felt were
inherently interesting as stories.
Thus our book employs what might be called an apprentice approach to
history rather than the synthetic approach of textbooks. A textbook strives
to be comprehensive and broad. It presents its findings in as rational and
programmatic a manner as possible. By contrast, apprentices learn through
a much less formal process; they learn their profession from artisans who
take their daily trade as it comes through the front door. A customer orders a
pewter pot? Very well, the artisan proceeds to fashion the pot and in doing so
shows the apprentice how to pour the mold. A client needs some engraving
done? Then the apprentice receives a first lesson in etching. The apprentice
 INTRODUCTION XV

method of teaching communicates a broad range of knowledge over the long

run by focusing on specific situations.
So also this book. Our discussion of methods is set in the context of spe­
cific problems historians have encountered over the years. In piecing the
individual stories together, we try to pause as an artisan might and point out
problems of evidence, historical perspective, or logical inference. Sometimes
we focus on problems that all historians must face, whatever their subjects.
These problems include such matters as the selection of evidence, historical
perspective, the analysis of a document, and the use of broader historical
theory. In other cases, we explore problems that are not encountered by
all historians but are characteristic of specific historical fields; these include
the use of photographic evidence, questions of psychohistory, problems
encountered analyzing oral interviews, the value of decision-making mod­
els in political history, and so on. In each case, we have tried to provide the
reader with a sense of vicarious participation-the savor of doing history as
well as of reading it.
Given our approach, the ultimate success of this book can be best mea­
sured in functional terms-how well it works for the apprentices and arti­
sans. We hope that the artisans, our fellow historians, will find the volume's
implicit as well as explicit definitions of good history worth considering.
In choosing our examples, we have naturally gravitated toward the work of
those historians we most respect. At the same time, we have drawn upon our
own original research in many of the topics discussed; we hope those find­
ings also may be of use to scholars.
As for the apprentices, we admit to being only modest proselytizers. We
recognize that of all the people who read this book, only a few will go on
to become professional historians. We do hope, however, that even casual
readers will come to appreciate the complexity and excitement that go into
the study of the past. History is not something that is simply brought out of
the archives, dusted off, and displayed as "the way things really were." It is a
painstaking construction, held together only with the help of assumptions,
hypotheses, and inferences. Readers of history who push dutifully onward,
unaware of all the backstage work, miss the essence of the discipline. They
miss the opportunity to question and to judge their reading critically. Most
of all, they miss the chance to learn how enjoyable it can be to go out and do
a bit of digging themselves.
PROLOGUE

The Strange Death

of Silas Deane

The rumors floating around London pointed to suicide. But "what

really happened" to Silas Deane could not be discovered unless
historians rejected the notion that they were merely couriers
between the past and present.

The writing of history is one of the most familiar ways of organizing human
knowledge. And yet, if familiarity has not always bred contempt, it has at
least encouraged a good deal of misunderstanding. All of us meet history at
a tender age when tales of the past easily blend with heroic myths of the cul­
ture. In Golden Books, Abe Lincoln looms every bit as large as Paul Bunyan,
while George Washington's cherry tree gets chopped down yearly with
almost as much ritual as St. Nick's Christmas tree goes up. Despite this long
familiarity, or perhaps because of it, most students absorb the required facts
about the past without any real conception of what history is. Even worse,
most think they do know what it is and never get around to discovering what
they missed.
"History is what happened in the past." That statement is the every­
day view of the matter. It supposes that historians must return to the past
through the surviving records and bring it back to the present to display
as "what really happened." The everyday view recognizes that this task is
often difficult. But historians are said to succeed if they bring back the facts
without distorting them or forcing a new perspective on them. In effect,
historians are seen as couriers between the past and present. Like all good
messengers, they are expected simply to deliver their information without
adding to it.
This everyday view of history is profoundly misleading. In order to dem­
onstrate how it is misleading, we would like to examine in detail an event that
"happened in the past"-the death of Silas Deane. Deane does not appear in
most American history texts, and rightly so. He served as a distinctly second­
rank diplomat for the United States during the years of the American Revo­
lution. Yet the story of Deane's death is an excellent example of an event that

XVll
XVlll PROLOGUE

cannot be understood merely by transporting it, courier-like, to the present.

In short, it illustrates the important difference between "what happened in
the past " and what history really is.

AN UNTIMELY DEATH
Silas Deane's career began with one of those rags-to-riches stories so much
appreciated in American folklore.In fact, Deane might have made a lasting
place for himself in the history texts, except that his career ended with an
equally dramatic riches-to-rags story.
He began life as the son of a humble blacksmith in Groton, Connecticut.
The blacksmith had aspirations for his boy and sent him to Yale College,
where Silas was quick to take advantage of his opportunities.After studying
law, Deane opened a practice near Hartford; he then continued his climb
up the social ladder by marrying a well-to-do widow, whose inheritance
included the business of her late husband, a merchant.Conveniently, Deane
became a merchant.After his first wife died, he married the granddaughter
of a former governor of Connecticut.
Not content to remain a prospering businessman, Deane entered poli­
tics. He served on Connecticut's Committee of Correspondence and later
as a delegate to the first and second Continental Congresses, where he
attracted the attention of prominent leaders, including Benjamin Franklin,
Robert Morris, and John Jay.In 1776 Congress sent Deane to France as the
first American to represent the united colonies abroad. His mission was to
purchase badly needed military supplies for the Revolutionary cause.A few
months later, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee joined him in an attempt to
arrange a formal treaty of alliance with France.The American commission­
ers concluded the alliance in March 1778.
Deane worked hard to progress from the son of a blacksmith all the way
to Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States to the Court of France.
Most observers described him as ambitious: someone who thoroughly
enjoyed fame, honor, and wealth. "You know his ambition- " wrote John
Adams to one correspondent, "his desire of making a Fortune....You also
know his Art and Enterprise. Such Characters are often useful, altho always
to be carefully watched and contracted, specially in such a government as
ours." One man in particular suspected Deane enough to watch him: Arthur
Lee, the third member of the American mission.Lee accused Deane of tak­
ing unfair advantage of his official position to make a private fortune-as
much as £50,000, some said.Deane stoutly denied the accusations, and Con­
gress engaged in a heated debate over his conduct.In 1778 it voted to recall
its Minister Plenipotentiary, although none of the charges had been conclu­
sively proved.
Deane embroiled himself in further controversy in 1781, having written
friends to recommend that America sue for peace and patch up the quarrel
with England.His letters were intercepted, and copies of them turned up in
 The Strange Death ofSilas De11ne X1X

"You know his ambition-his desire of making a Fortune....You also know his Art
and Enterprise.Such Characters are often useful, altho always to be carefully watched
and contracted, specially in such a government as ours."-:John Adams on Silas Deane.

a New York Tory newspaper just after Cornwallis surrendered to Washington

at Yorktown. For Deane, the timing could not have been worse. With Ameri­
can victory complete, anyone advocating that the United States rejoin Britain

was considered as much a traitor as Benedict Arnold. So Deane suddenly found

himself adrift. He could not return to America, for no one would have him.
Nor could he go to England without confirming his reputation as a traitor. And
he could not stay in France, where he had injudiciously accused Louis XVI of
aiding the Americans for purely selfish reasons. Rejected on all sides, Deane
took refuge in Flanders.
The next few years of his life were spent unhappily. Without friends and
with little money, he continued in Flanders until 1783, when the controversy
xx PROLOGUE

had died down enough for him to move to England. There he lived in obscu­
rity, took to drink, and wound up boarding at the house of an unsavory pros­
titute. The only friend who remained faithful to him was Edward Bancroft,
another Connecticut Yankee who, as a boy, had been Deane's pupil and later
his personal secretary during the
The only friend who remained Paris negotiations for the alliance.
faithful was Edward Bancroft, a spy Although Bancroft's position as a
for the Americans who had known secretary seemed innocent enough,
Deane in Paris. members of the Continental Con­
gress knew that Bancroft was also
acting as a spy for the Americans, using his connections in England to secure
information about the British ministry's war plans. With the war concluded,
Bancroft was back in London. Out of kindness, he provided Deane with liv­
ing money from time to time.
Finally, Deane decided he could no longer live in London and in 1789
booked passage on a ship sailing for the United States. When Thomas
Jefferson heard the news, he wrote his friendJames Madison: "Silas Deane is
coming over to finish his days in America, not having one sou to subsist on
elsewhere. He is a wretched monument of the consequences of a departure
from right."
The rest of the sad story could be gotten from the obituaries. Deane
boarded the Boston Packet in mid-September, and it sailed out of London
down the Thames River to the Atlantic. A storm came up, however, and on
September 19 the ship lost both its anchors and beat a course for safer shel­
ter, to wait out the storm. On September 22, while walking the quarterdeck
with the ship's captain, Deane suddenly "complain'd of a dizziness in his
head, and an oppression at his stomach." The captain immediately put him
to bed. Deane's condition worsened; twice he tried to say something, but no
one was able to make out his words. A "drowsiness and insensibility continu­
ally incroached upon his faculties," and only four hours after the first signs
of illness he breathed his last.
Such, in outline, was the rise and fall of the ambitious Silas Deane. The
story itself seems pretty clear, although certainly people might interpret it in
different ways. Thomas Jefferson thought Deane's unhappy career demon­
strated "the consequences of a departure from right," whereas one English
newspaper more sympathetically attributed his downfall to the mistake of
"placing confidence in his [American] Compatriots, and doing them service
before he had got his compensation, of which no well-bred Politician was
before him ever guilty." Yet either way, the basic story remains the same­
the same, that is, until the historian begins putting together a more complete
account of Deane's life. Then some of the basic facts become clouded.
For example, a researcher familiar with the correspondence of Americans
in Europe during 1789 would realize that a rumor had been making its way
around London in the weeks following Deane's death. According to certain
people, Deane had become depressed by his poverty, ill health, and low reputa­
tion, and consequently had committed suicide.John Cutting, a New England
 The Strange Death ofSilas Deane XX1

merchant and friend of Jefferson, mentioned the rumor that Deane "had
predetermin'd to take a sufficient quantity of Laudanum [a form of opium] to
ensure his dissolution" before the boat could sail for America. John Quincy
Adams heard that "every probability" of the situation suggested Deane's death
was "voluntary and self-administered." And Tom Paine, the famous pamphle­
teer, also reported the gossip: "Cutting told me he took poison."
At this point we face a substantial problem. Obviously, historians cannot
rest content with the facts that come most easily to hand. They must search
the odd corners of libraries and letter collections in order to put together a
complete story. But how do historians know when their research is "com­
plete"? How do they know to search one collection of letters rather than
another? These questions point up the misconception at the heart of the
everyday view of history. History is not "what happened in the past"; rather,
it is the act of selecting, analyzing, and writing about the past. It is some­
thing that is done, that is constructed, rather than an inert body of data that
lies scattered through the archives.
The distinction is important. It allows us to recognize the confusion in
the question of whether a history of something is "complete." If history were
merely "what happened in the past," there would never be a "complete" his­
tory of Silas Deane-or even a complete history of the last day of his life.
The past holds an infinite number of facts about those last days, and they
could never all be included in a historical account.
The truth is, no historian would want to include all the facts. Here, for
example, is a list of items from the past that might form part of a history of
Silas Deane. Which ones should be included?

Deane is sent to Paris to help conclude a treaty of alliance.

Arthur Lee accuses him of cheating his country to make a private profit.
Deane writes letters that make him unpopular in America.
He goes into exile and nearly starves.
Helped out by a gentleman friend, he buys passage on a ship for America as
his last chance to redeem himself.
He takes ill and dies before the ship can leave; rumors suggest he may have
committed suicide.

* * *

Ben Franklin and Arthur Lee are members of the delegation to Paris.
Edward Bancroft is Deane's private secretary and an American spy.
Men who know Deane say he is talented but ambitious and ought to be
watched.

* * *

Before Deane leaves, he visits an American artist, John Trumbull.

The Boston Packet is delayed for several days by a storm.
On the last day of his life, Deane gets out of bed in the morning.
XXll PROLOGUE

He puts on his clothes and buckles his shoes.

He eats breakfast.
When he takes ill, he tries to speak twice.
He is buried several days later.

Even this short list demonstrates the impossibility of including all the
facts. For behind each one lie hundreds more. You might mention that
Deane put on his clothes and ate breakfast, but consider also: "What color
were his clothes? "When did he get up that morning? "What did he have for
breakfast? "When did he leave the table? All these things "happened in the
past," but only a comparatively small number of them can appear in a history
of Silas Deane.
Readers may object that we are placing too much emphasis on this pro­
cess of selection. Surely, a certain amount of good judgment will suggest
which facts are important. "Who needs to know what color Deane's clothes
were or when he got up from the breakfast table?
Admittedly, this objection has some merit, as the list of facts about Deane
demonstrates. The list is divided into three groups, roughly according to
the way common sense might rank them in importance. The first group
contains facts that every historian would be likely to include. The second
group contains less important information, which could either be included
or left out. (It might be useful, for instance, to know who Arthur Lee and
Edward Bancroft were, but not essential.) The last group contains informa­
tion that appears to be either too detailed or else unnecessary. Deane may
have visitedJohn Trumbull, but then he surely visited other people as well.
"Why include any of that? Knowing that the Boston Packet was delayed by
a storm reveals little about Silas Deane. And readers will assume without
being told that Deane rose in the morning, put on his clothes, and had
breakfast.
But if common sense helps select evidence, it also produces a good deal
of pedestrian history. The fact is, the straightforward account of Silas Deane
we have just presented has actually managed to miss the most fascinating
parts of the story.
Fortunately, one enterprising historian named Julian Boyd was not satis­
fied with the traditional account of the matter. He examined the known facts
of Deane's career and put them together in ways that common sense had not
suggested. Take, for example, two items on our list: (1) Deane was down on
his luck and left in desperation for America; and (2) he visitedJohn Trumbull.
One fact is from the "important" items on the list and the other from items
that seem incidental. How do they fit together?
To answer that, we have to know the source of information about the visit
to Trumbull's, which is the letter fromJohn Cutting informingJefferson of
Deane's rumored suicide.

A subscription had been made here chiefly by Americans to defray the expense
of getting [Deane] out of this country.... Dr. Bancroft with great humanity
 The Strange Death of Silas Deane XXlll

and equal discretion undertook the management of the man and his business.
Accordingly his passage was engaged, comfortable cloaths and stores for his
voyage were laid in, and apparently without much reluctance he embarked....
I happen'd to see him a few days since at the lodging of Mr. Trumbull and
thought I had never seen him look better.

We are now in a better position to see how our two items fit together.
And as Julian Boyd has pointed out, they don't fit. According to the first,
Deane was depressed,dejected, almost starving. According to the second,
he had "never looked better." Alert historians begin to get nervous when
they see contradictions like that, so they hunt around a little more. And
Julian Boyd found, among the collection of papers published by the Con­
necticut and New York historical societies, that Deane had been writing
letters of his own.
One went to his brother-in-law in America, who had agreed to help pay
Deane's transportation over and to receive him when he arrived-something
that nobody had been willing to do for years.Other letters reveal that Deane
had plans for what he would do when he finally returned home. He had
seen models in England of the new steam engines, which he hoped might
operate gristmills in America. He
had talked to friends about getting Was Deane really depressed enough
a canal built from Lake Champlain to commit suicide? Or looking
in New York to the St. Lawrence forward to a chance to clear
River in order to promote trade. his name?
As early as 1785 Deane had been
at work drumming up support for his canal project.He had even laboriously
calculated the cost of the canal's construction ("Suppose a labourer to dig
and remove six feet deep and eight feet square in one day....2,933 days of
labour will dig one mile in length, twenty feet wide and eight feet deep.")
Obviously,Deane looked forward to a promising future.
Lastly, Deane appeared to believe that the controversy surrounding his
French mission had finally died down.As he wrote an American friend,

It is now almost ten years since I have solicited for an impartial inquiry [into
the dispute over my conduct] ... that justice might be done to my fortune
and my character....You can sufficiently imagine, without my attempting to
describe, what I must have suffered on every account during so long a period
of anxiety and distress.I hope that it is now drawing to a close.

Other letters went to George Washington andJohnJay,reiterating Deane's

innocence.
All this information makes the two items on our list even more puzzling.
If Deane was depressed and discouraged, why was he so enthusiastic about
coming back to build canals and gristmills? If he really believed that his time
of "anxiety and distress " was "drawing to a close," why did he commit sui­
cide? Of course, Deane might have been subject to dramatic shifts in mood.
XXlV PROLOGUE

Perhaps hope for the future alternated with despair about his chances for
success. Perhaps a sudden fit of depression caused him to take his life.
But another piece of "unimportant" information, way down in the third
group of our list, makes this hypothesis difficult to accept. After Deane's ship
left London, it was delayed offshore for more than a week. Suppose Deane
did decide to commit suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum. Where did
he get the drug? Surely not by walking up to the ship's surgeon and asking
for it. He must have purchased it in London, before he left. Yet he remained
on shipboard for more than a week. If Deane bought the laudanum during a
temporary "fit" of depression, why did he wait a week before taking it? And
if his depression was not just a sudden fit, how do we explain the optimistic
letters to America?
This close look at three apparently unrelated facts indicates that perhaps
there is more to Deane's story than meets the eye. It would be well, then, to
reserve judgment about our first reconstruction of Silas Deane's career and
try to find as much information about the man as possible-whether or not
it seems relevant at first. That means investigating not only Deane himself
but also his friends and associates, such as Ben Franklin, Arthur Lee, and
Edward Bancroft. Since it is impossible in this prologue to look closely at all
of Deane's acquaintances, for purpose of example we will take only one: his
friend Bancroft.

SILAS DEANE'S FRIEND

Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, where his step­
father presided over a respectable tavern, the Bunch of Grapes. Bancroft
was a clever fellow, and his father soon apprenticed him to a physician.
Like many boys before him, Edward did not fancy his position and so ran
away to sea. Unlike many boys, he managed to make the most of his situ­
ation. His ship landed in Barbados, and there Bancroft signed on as the
surgeon for a plantation in Surinam, also known as Guiana. The planta­
tion owner, Paul Wentworth, liked the young man and let him use his
private library for study. In addition, Bancroft met another doctor who
taught him much about the area's exotic tropical plants and animals. When
Bancroft returned to New England in 17 66 and continued on to London
the following year, he knew enough about Surinam's wildlife to publish a
book entitled An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana in South America.
It was well received by knowledgeable scholars and, among other things,
established that an electric eel's shock was caused by electricity, a fact not
previously recognized.
A young American bright enough to publish a book at age twenty-five
and to experiment with electric eels attracted the attention of another elec­
trical experimenter then in London, Ben Franklin. Franklin befriended
Bancroft and introduced him to many influential colleagues, not only learned
philosophers but also the politicians with whom Franklin worked as colonial
 The Strange Death ofSilas Deane xxv

agent for Pennsylvania. A second trip to Surinam produced more research on

plants used in making color dyes, research so successful that Bancroft soon
found himself elected to the prestigious Royal Society of Medicine. At the
same time, Franklin led Bancroft into the political arena, both public and
private. On the public side, Bancroft published a favorable review of Thomas
Jefferson's pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America; pri­
vately, he joined Franklin and other investors in an attempt to gain a charter
for land along the banks of the Ohio River.
Up to this point we have been able to sketch Bancroft's career with­
out once mentioning the name of Silas Deane. Common sense would
suggest that the information about Bancroft's early travels, his scientific
studies, his friends in Surinam, tell us little about Deane, and that the
story ought to begin with a certain letter Bancroft received from Deane
in June 1 776. (Common sense is again wrong, but we must wait a little to
discover why.)
The letter, which came to Bancroft in 1776, informed him that his old
friend Silas Deane was coming to France as a merchant engaged in private
business. Would Bancroft be interested in crossing over from England to
meet Deane at Calais to catch up on news for old time's sake? An invitation
like that would very likely have attracted Bancroft's curiosity. He did know
Deane, who had been his teacher in 1758, but not very well. Why would
Deane now write and suggest a meeting? Bancroft may have guessed the
rest, or he may have known it from other contacts; in any case, he wrote his
"old friend" that he would make all possible haste for Calais.
The truth of the matter, as we know, was that Deane had come to France
to secure military supplies for the colonies. Franklin, who was back in Phila­
delphia, had suggested to Congress's Committee of Secret Correspondence
that Deane contact Bancroft as a good source of information about British
war plans. Bancroft could easily continue his friendship with English offi­
cials, because he did not have the reputation of being a hotheaded American
patriot. So Deane met Bancroft at Calais in July, and the two concluded their
arrangements. Bancroft would be Deane's "private secretary" when needed
in Paris and a spy for the Americans when in England.
It turned out that Deane's arrangement worked well-perhaps a little too
well. Legally, Deane was permitted to collect a commission on all the sup­
plies he purchased for Congress, but he went beyond that. He and Bancroft
used their official connections in France to conduct a highly profitable private
trade of their own. Deane, for instance, sometimes sent ships from France
without declaring whether they were loaded with private or public goods.
Then if the ships arrived safely, he would declare that the cargo was private,
his own. But if the English navy captured the goods on the high seas, he
labeled it government merchandise and the public absorbed the loss.
Deane used Bancroft to take advantage of his official position in other
ways. Both men speculated in the London insurance markets, which were
the eighteenth-century equivalent of gambling parlors. Anyone who wished
XXVl PROLOGUE

could take out "insurance" against a particular event that might happen in
the future. An insurer, for example, might quote odds on the chances of
France going to war with England within the year. The insured would pay
whatever premium he wished, say £1,000, and if France did go to war and
the odds had been five-to-one against it, the insured would receive £5 ,000.
Wagers were made on almost any public event: which armies would win
which battles, which politicians would fall from power, and even whether a
particular lord would die before the year was out.
Obviously, someone who had access to inside information-someone who
knew in advance, for instance, that France was going to war with England­
could win a fortune. That was
Deane and Bancroft both made exactly what Bancroft and Deane
money from inside information, decided to do. Deane was in charge
by gambling on the London of concluding the French alliance,
insurance markets. and he knew that if he succeeded,
Britain would be forced to declare
war on France. Bancroft hurried across to London as soon as the treaty had
been concluded and took out the proper insurance before the news went
public. The profits shared by the two men from this and similar ventures
amounted to approximately £10,000. Like most gamblers, however, Deane
also lost wagers. In the end, he netted little for his troubles.
Historians know these facts because they now have access to the papers
of Deane, Bancroft, and others. Acquaintances of the two men lacked this
advantage, but they suspected shady dealings anyway. Arthur Lee pub­
licly accused Deane and Bancroft of playing the London insurance game.
(Deane shot back that Lee was doing the same thing.) And the moralistic
John Adams found Bancroft's conduct distasteful. Bancroft, according to
Adams, was

a meddler in stocks as well as reviews, and frequently went into the alley,
and into the deepest and darkest retirements and recesses of the brokers and
jobbers ... and found amusement as well, perhaps, as profit, by listening to
all the news and anecdotes, true or false, that were there whispered or more
boldly pronounced. ... This man had with him in France, a woman with
whom he lives, and who by the French was called La Femme de Monsieur
Bancroft.At tables he would season his foods with such enormous quantities
of cayenne pepper which assisted by generous burgundy would set his tongue
a running in the most licentious way both at table and after dinner.

Yet for all Bancroft's dubious habits, and for all the suspicions of men like
Lee and Adams, there was one thing that almost no one at the time sus­
pected, and that not even historians discovered until the records of certain
British officials were opened to the public more than a century later. Edward
Bancroft was a double agent.
At the end of July 1776, after he had arranged to be Deane's secretary,
Bancroft returned to England and met with Paul Wentworth, his friend
from Surinam, who was then working in London for Britain's intelligence
 The Strange Death ofSilas Deane XXVll

organization. Immediately Wentworth realized how valuable Bancroft would

be as a spy and introduced him to two secretaries of state. They in turn per­
suaded Bancroft to submit reports on the American negotiations in France.
For his services, he received a lifetime pension of £2 00 a year-a figure the
British were only too happy to pay for such good information. So quick was
Bancroft's reporting that the secretaries of state knew about the American
mission to France even before the United States Congress could confirm
that Deane had arrived safely!
Eventually, Bancroft discovered that he could pass his information directly
to the British ambassador at the French court. To do so, he wrote innocent
letters on the subject of "gallantry" and signed them "B. Edwards." On the
same paper would go another note written in invisible ink, to appear only
when the letter was dipped in a special developer held by Lord Stormont,
the British ambassador. Bancroft left his letters every Tuesday morning in
a sealed bottle in a hole near the trunk of a tree on the south terrace of
the Tuileries, the royal palace. Lord Stormont's secretary would put any
return information near another tree on the same terrace. With this system
in operation, Stormont could receive intelligence without having to wait for
it to filter back from England.
Did any Americans suspect Bancroft of double-dealing? Arthur Lee once
claimed he had evidence to charge Bancroft with treason, but he never
produced it. In any case, Lee had a reputation for suspecting everybody of
everything. Franklin, for his part, shared lodgings with Deane and Bancroft
during their stays in Paris. He had reason to guess that someone close to
the American mission was leaking secrets-especially when Lord Stormont
and the British newspapers made embarrassingly accurate accusations about
French aid. The French wished to keep their assistance secret in order to
avoid war with England as long as possible, but of course Franklin knew
America would fare better with France fighting, so he did little to stop the
leaks. "If I was sure," he remarked, "that my valet de place was a spy, as he
probably is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other respects
I liked him." So the French would tell Franklin he really ought to guard
his papers more closely, and Franklin would say yes, yes, he really would
have to do something about that; and the secrets continued to leak. Perhaps
Franklin suspected Deane and Bancroft of playing the London insurance
markets, but there is no evidence that he knew Bancroft was a double agent.
What about Deane, who was closer to Bancroft than anyone else? We
have no proof that he shared the double agent's secret, but his alliance
with Bancroft in other intrigues tells against him. Furthermore, one pub­
lished leak pointed to a source so close to the American commissioners that
Franklin began to investigate. As Julian Boyd has pointed out, Deane imme­
diately directed suspicion toward a man he knew perfectly well was not a spy.
We can only conclude he did so to help throw suspicion away from Bancroft.
Very likely, if Bancroft was willing to help Deane play his games with the
London insurers, Deane was willing to assist Bancroft in his game with Brit­
ish intelligence.
xx:v:iii PR.oLOGUB

The Tuileries, much as it appeared when Bancroft and Lord Stormont used the
south terrace as a drop for their secret correspondence. The royal palace overlooks
a magnificent formal garden that> as a modem observer has noted, "seems so large,
so full of surprising hidden comers and unexpected stairways, that its strict ground
plan-sixteen carefully spaced and shaped gardens of trees, separated by arrow­
straight walks-is not immediately discemable.,,

Of the two, Bancroft seems to have made out better. While Deane suf­
fered reproach and exile for his conduct, Bancroft returned to England still
respected by both the Americans and the British. Not that he had been with­
out narrow escapes. Some of the British ministty (the king especially) did
not trust him, and he once came close to being hanged for treason when
his superiors rightly suspected that he had associated with John the Painter,
an unbalanced fanatic who tried to set England's navy ablaze. But Bancroft
left for Paris at the first opportunity, waited until the storm blew over, and
returned to London at the end of the war with his lifetime pension raised to
£1,000 a year. At the time of Deane's death, he was doing more of his sci­
entific experiments, in hopes that Parliament would grant him a profitable
monopoly on a new process for making dyes.

DEANE'S DEATH: A SECOND LOOK

So we finally arrive, the long way around, back where the story began:
September 1789 and Deane's death. But now we have a much larger store
of information out of which to construct a narrative. Since writing history
 The Strange Death ofSilas Deane XX1X

involves the acts of analyzing and selecting, let us review the results of our
investigation.
We know that Deane was indeed engaged in dubious private ventures,
ventures Congress would have condemned as unethical. We also have reason
to suspect that Deane knew Bancroft was a spy for the British. Combining
that evidence with what we already know about Deane's death, we might
theorize that Deane committed suicide because, underneath all his claims to
innocence, he knew he was guilty as Congress charged. The additional evi­
dence, in other words, reveals a possible new motive for Deane's suicide.
Yet this theory presents definite problems. In the first place, Deane never
admitted any wrongdoing to anyone-not in all the letters he wrote, not in
any of his surviving papers. That does not mean he was innocent, nor even
that he believed himself innocent. But often it is easier for a person to lie to
himself than to his friends. Perhaps Deane actually convinced himself that
he was blameless, that he had a right to make a little extra money from his
influential position, and that he did no more than anyone would in his situ­
ation. Certainly his personal papers point to that conclusion. And if Deane
believed himself innocent-correctly or not-would he have any obvious
motive for suicide? Furthermore, the theory does not explain the puzzle that
started this investigation. If Deane felt guilty enough about his conduct to
commit suicide, why did that guilt increase ten years after the fact? If he did
feel suddenly guilty, why wait a week aboard ship before taking the fatal dose
of laudanum? For that matter, why go up and chat with the captain when
death was about to strike?
No, things still do not sit quite right, so we must question the theory. What
proof do we have that Deane committed suicide? Rumors about London.
Tom Paine heard it from Cut­
ting, the merchant. And Cutting Since writing history involves the
reports in his letter to Jefferson acts of analyzing and selecting, we
that Deane's suicide was "the suspi­ need to review the results of our
cion of Dr. Bancroft." How do we
investigation.
know the circumstances of Deane's
death? The captain made a report, but for some reason it was not preserved.
The one account that did survive was written by Bancroft, at the request of a
friend. Then there were the anonymous obituaries in the newspapers. Who
wrote them? Very likely Bancroft composed at least one; certainly, he was
known as Silas Deane's closest friend and would have been consulted by any
interested parties. There are a lot of strings here, which, when pulled hard
enough, all run back to the affable Dr. Bancroft. What do we know about his
situation in 1789?
We know Bancroft is dependent on a pension of £1,000 a year, given him
for his faithful service as a British spy. We know he is hoping Parliament
will grant him a monopoly for making color dyes. Suddenly his old associate
Deane, who has been leading a dissolute life in London, decides to return
to America, vindicate himself to his former friends, and start a new life. Put
yourself in Bancroft's place. Would you be just a little nervous about that
xxx PROLOGUE

idea? Here is a man down on his luck, now picking up and going to America
to clear his reputation. What would Deane do to clear it? Tell everything
he knew about his life in Paris? Submit his record books to Congress, as he
had been asked to do so many years before? If Deane knew Bancroft was a
double agent, would he say so? And if Deane's records mentioned the affair
of John the Painter (as indeed they did), what would happen if knowledge
of Bancroft's role in the plot reached England? Ten years earlier, Bancroft
would have been hanged. True, the angry feelings of the war had faded, but
even if he were spared death, would Parliament grant a monopoly on color
dyes to a known traitor? Would Parliament continue the £1,000 pension? It
was one thing to have Deane living in London, where Bancroft could watch
him; it would be quite another to have him all the way across the Atlantic
Ocean, ready to tell-who knows what?
Admit it: if you were Bancroft, wouldn't you be just a little nervous?
We are forced to consider, however reluctantly, that Deane was not
expecting to die as he walked the deck of the Boston Packet. Yet if Bancroft
did murder Deane, how? He was not aboard ship when death came and
had not seen Deane for more than a week. That is a good alibi, but then,
Bancroft was a clever man. We know (once again from the letters of John
Cutting) that Bancroft was the person who "with great humanity and equal
discretion undertook the management of the man and [the] business" of get­
ting Deane ready to leave for America. Bancroft himself wrote Jefferson that
he had been visiting Deane often "to assist him with advice, medicins, and
money for his subsistence." If Deane were a laudanum addict, as Bancroft
hinted to Cutting, might not the good doctor who helped with "medicins"
also have procured the laudanum? And having done that, might he not eas­
ily slip some other deadly chemical into the mixture, knowing full well that
Deane would not use it until he was on shipboard and safely off to America?
That conclusion is only conjecture. We have no direct evidence to suggest
that this scenario is what really happened.
But we do know one other fact for sure; and in light of our latest the­
ory, it is an interesting one. Undeniably, Edward Bancroft was an expert on
p01sons.
He did not advertise that knowledge, of course; few people in London at the
time of Deane's death would have been likely to remember the fact. But twenty
years earlier, the historian may recall, Bancroft wrote a book on the natural
history of Guiana. At that time he not only investigated electric eels and color
dyes, but also the poisons of the area, particularly curare (or "Woorara" as
Bancroft called it). He investigated it so well, in fact, that when he returned to
England he brought samples of curare with him, which (he announced in the
book) he had deposited with the publishers so that any gentleman of "unim­
peachable" character might use the samples for scientific study.
Furthermore, Bancroft seemed to be a remarkably good observer not only
of the poisons, but also of those who used them. His book described in ample
detail the natives' ability to prepare poisons that,
 The Strange Death of Silas Deane XXX1

given in the smallest quantities, produce a very slow but inevitable death, par­
ticularly a composition which resembles wheat-flour, which they sometimes
use to revenge past injuries, that have been long neglected, and are thought
forgotten. On these occasions they always feign an insensibility of the injury
which they intend to revenge, and even repay it with services and acts of
friendship, until they have destroyed all distrust and apprehension of danger in
the destined victim of the vengeance. When this is effected, they meet at some
festival, and engage him to drink with them, drinking first themselves to obvi­
ate suspicion, and afterwards secretly dropping the poison, ready concealed
under their nails, which are usually long, into the drink.

Twenty years later Bancroft was busy at work with the color dyes he had
brought back from Surinam. Had he, by any chance, also held onto any of
those poisons?
Unless new evidence comes to light, we will probably never know for
sure. Historians are generally forced to deal with probabilities, not certain­
ties, and we leave you to draw your own conclusions about the death of Silas
Deane.
What does seem certain is that whatever "really happened" to Deane two
hundred years ago cannot be determined today without the active participa­
tion of the historian. Being courier to the past is not enough. For better or
worse, historians inescapably leave an imprint as they go about their busi­
ness: asking interesting questions about apparently dull facts, seeing con­
nections between subjects that had not seemed related before, shifting and
rearranging evidence until it assumes a coherent pattern. The past is not
history, only the raw materials of it. How those raw materials come to be
fashioned and shaped is the central concern of this book.

Additional Reading

The historian proposing the possibility of foul play on the Boston Packet is
Julian Boyd. He makes his case in a series of three articles titled "Silas Deane:
Death by a Kindly Teacher of Treason?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3d
ser., 16 (1959): 165-187, 319-342, and 515-550. Edward Bancroft's role as
double agent was not established conclusively until the 1890s. His connec­
tions to the British are spelled out in Paul L. Ford, Edward Bancroft's Narra­
tive ofthe Objects and Proceedings ofSilas Deane (Brooklyn, NY, 1891). Further
background on Bancroft's youth may be gained, of course, from his lively
Essay on the Natural History of Guiana in South America (London, 1769).
Boyd's case for murder has been questioned by William Stinchcombe
in "A Note on Silas Deane's Death," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.,
32 (1975): 619-624. Stinchcombe has suggested that, contrary to Boyd's
XXXll PROLOGUE

suggestion, Deane did not face any really hopeful prospects for success in
America. If Deane continued to be down on his luck when he departed for
America, then the suicide theory again becomes more probable. For a third
opinion, consult D. K. Anderson and G. T. Anderson, "The Death of Silas
Deane," New England Quarterly 62 (1984): 98-105. The Andersons surveyed
several medical authorities and concluded that Deane may well have suf­
fered from chronic tuberculosis and died from a stroke or some other acute
attack.
CHAPTER I

Contact

In 1539 Hernando de Soto ventured into North America looking

for Indian empires. More than a century passed before other
Europeans returned. What went unrecorded in the years following
that first contact?

Here is what the conquistador Hernando de Soto prescribed for his final
resting place, as set out in his last will and testament: that a chapel be erected
within the Church of San Miguel in Jerez de los Caballeros, Spain, where
De Soto grew up, at a cost of 2,000 ducats, with an altarpiece featuring the
Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Conception; that his tomb be covered over
in fine black broadcloth topped by a red cross of the Order of the Knights
of Santiago, and on special occasions a pall of black velvet with the De Soto
coat of arms placed on the altar; that a chaplain be hired at a salary of 12,000
maravedis to perform five masses every week for the souls of De Soto, his
parents, and wife; that thirty masses be said for him on the day his body
was interred, and twenty for Our Lady of the Conception, ten for the Holy
Ghost, sixty for souls in purgatory and masses for many others as well; that
150,000 maravedis be given annually to his wife Isabel for her needs and an
equal amount used yearly to marry off "three orphan damsels ...the poorest
that can be found," who would then assist his wife and also serve to burnish
the memory of De Soto as a man of charity and substance.
These instructions were written, signed, and witnessed the tenth day of
May 1539. Eight days later De Soto departed from Havana, Cuba, at the
head of some 600 followers into the unknown lands called La Florida by
Spain. The expedition went in search of gold, treasure, fame, and power.
And this is how De Soto actually died and was buried, almost three years
and some 3 ,000 miles later:
His final headquarters lay in the house of an Indian chief, whose people
had fled their village upon the expedition's arrival. Walled in by a tall pali­
sade, the village lay near a very large river; the Indians called it Tamaliseu;
to the Spanish it was Rio del Espiritu Santo.We know it today as the Mis­
sissippi, and the settlement's most likely location was near present-day Mc­
Arthur, Arkansas. But De Soto had no idea where he was, except in the most

1
2 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Even artists who pay attention to the det:ails of historical dress usually clothe
the De Soto expedition in the equipment that they started with. But after several
years of trekking through the continent, most members of the expedition were
wearing Indian blankets or animal skins to survive.

general terms. The big river, he felt certain, must flow into the great sea­
the Gulf of Mexico. But how far away that sea was, who could say?
His expedition was in tatters. It had survived only by commandeering
stores of food grown by the Indians, as it had done from the start. After three
years of wandering in search of an empire to conquer, most of De Soto's
men no longer had the original clothes on their backs. Modern paintings
of the expedition show the conquistadors with the armored helmets, vest­
like leather jerkins, breeches, and boots. But by April 1542 native substitutes
had replaced much of that equipment. From Indian blankets "were made
loose coats and cassocks," one member of the expedition reported. "From
the deerskins were also made some jerkins, shirts, stockings, and shoes, and
from the bear skins some very good cloaks, for water would not go through
them." One high-ranking knight was reduced to "wearing a short garment
of the blankets of that country, torn on the sides, his flesh showing, no hat,
bare-headed, bare-footed, without hose or shoes, a buckler on his back, a
sword without a shield, amidst heavy frosts and cold."
The area around the Mississippi where the expedition was encamped
seemed as thickly settled as any De Soto had encountered. Inunediately he dis­
patched scouts on horseback south, to seek. news of the great sea. Meanwhile,
 Contact 3

he sent a message to the leader of Quigualtam, a powerful chiefdom across

the river. Perhaps because he felt threatened by the dense population, he
announced in his message that he was no ordinary human but the son of the
sun,a personage to be worshiped.He requested that the ruler of Quigualtam
visit him.To another chief who approached the Spanish he showed a mirror,
which the Indians had never seen before, angled so that De Soto's face was
reflected in it. The mirror image was his spirit, which flitted invisibly among
the Indians and returned with news of whatever they were saying.They could
not deceive him,he warned.
After a week struggling across swamps and streams, the scouts returned
with no reliable information about the great sea. A retreat on foot seemed
near impossible; if the expedition built boats,it was not clear how far down­
river they would have to float,or if there were any big falls of water to block
their way.After all the searching,the hardships,the constant skirmishing,De
Soto's "grief was intense on seeing the small prospect he had for reaching the
sea....With that thought,he fell sick " and took to bed with a fever.Worse,
the chief of Quigualtam answered that he was not accustomed to visit any­
one; De Soto should visit him. This newcomer was "the son of the sun "? If
so,"let him dry up the great river and [then the chief] would believe him."
De Soto raged; if he had not been so ill,he would have led a raiding party to
capture the chief.Instead,he ordered a detachment to attack a nearby village,
whose leader had also angered him.
The Spanish rode down on the "The danger of being lost in that
settlement, slaying men, women, land ...stared them all in the face."
and children without mercy. Still
the rumors persisted that Quigualtam was preparing an attack. "The danger
of being lost in that land ...stared them all in the face."
As De Soto's strength ebbed, he gave up his command. The next day he
died,"in a land and a time when his illness had very little solace," one associ­
ate recalled.Fortune had raised him high,"as she is wont to do with others,
so that he might fall from a greater height." Another comrade was even less
generous: "The governor, at seeing himself surrounded, and nothing com­
ing about according to his expectation, sickened and died."
The new leader,Luis de Moscoso,decided that the Indians must not learn
of De Soto's death-especially given the conquistador's boast that he was the
immortal son of the sun.In the dead of night,his men buried his body near
a gate to the town. But the Indians knew De Soto was now nowhere to be
seen; and they noticed the disturbed earth by the gate. So again under cover
of darkness, Moscoso ordered the body dug up and smuggled into a canoe.
Wrapped in blankets, weighted down with sand,it was paddled out into the
Mississippi and dispatched to a watery grave.
So much for a memorial chapel back in Spain, the red cross atop black
broadcloth, the hundreds of masses. Before dying, De Soto was forced to
scribble a new will. In executing it,Moscoso gathered the ragged remnants
of the expedition and auctioned off their leader's magnificent possessions:
four Indian slaves,three horses,and 700 hogs.
There is more later to say about the hogs.
4 AFTER THE FACT: THE AB.T OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

A romanticized view of De Soto's burial as portrayed in Footprin-ts ofFour Centuries:

The Story ofthe American People (1894).

CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION

In the annals of American history, the death of Hernando de Soto is more
widely known than that of Silas Deane. But the two make a useful pair. In
fitting together the facts surrounding Deane's death, we came to understand
that history is not simply ''what happened in the past," but rather a construc­
tion of it, fashioned from the raw materials of that past. As De Soto's story
will show, we need to take that insight one step further. History is not only
constructed; it is continually in need of reconstruction. It needs to be reas­
sembled and rebuilt, over and over again.
Skeptics resist the notion that history has to be refashioned on a regular
basis. Objections most often surface in relation to textbooks. As historians,
the two of us have written a number of surveys of the American past. (This is
the fifth time we have revised After the Fact.) When we mention that we are
revising a text, the reaction is often puzzlement. What is there to do, other
than to add a few pages to bring the story up-to-date? Yes, detective work
went into putting the story together. But historians have had decades, even
centuries, to piece together topics from the past. Regardless of the construc­
tion involved, the past itself has not changed.
 Contact 5

But in point of fact, the further back in time historians reach, the greater
the need for regular reassessment. Nowhere is this need more apparent than
in the story of the first encounters between the civilizations of the western
and eastern hemispheres.
Traditionally, American history has been taught as if it begins with first
contact. Why that should be is not particularly self-evident. Humans have
lived in the Americas at the very least for over 12,000 years. If you extend
your arm outward and imagine that the distance from your shoulder to the
end of your fingers represents the time humans have inhabited the western
hemisphere, Columbus's arrival in 1492 would be located at about the sec­
ond joint of your index finger. In most American history texts, a description
of all the human events taking place before Columbus-from your shoulder
to that second finger joint-takes up about 20 pages. The last inch or so of
your fingers-the 500 years following 1492-takes up about 980.
Why the imbalance? One reason is that, by and large, contact marks the
beginning of recorded history in the Americas, especially North America.
For the first time, written sources exist to document events, and we can see
in more detail what is going on. Or so it would seem.
Over the past half century, however, historians have come to realize that
they have taken far too narrow a view of the situation. Archaeologists have
long excavated a wealth of evidence about societies lacking written records.
Their efforts have expanded as more sites have been discovered, analyzed,
and compared. Archaeologists have also made progress in deciphering Aztec
and Mayan systems of writing and have unearthed inscriptions from the
earlier Olmec and Zapotec civilizations. Even in North America where no
early written languages have been found, archaeologists have reconstructed
the daily lives, hunting and farming practices, the structures of villages and
societies, and even religious attitudes. They have done so based on evidence
from pottery shards, animal bones, grave sites, architectural remains, and
even pollen and soil samples.
Equally important, historians have begun to place human culture within
a broader natural framework. They have recognized, to put it bluntly, that
human history is not merely the
history of humans. The traditional
The era of contact set in motion
topics-politics, war, economics,
a complex series of ecological
culture-play out within a larger
natural setting that is physical, interactions that transformed the
geographical, biological. Ecosys­ Americas.
tem is the term used to define a
region as a network of relationships between organisms and their environ­
ment; ecology, the discipline that studies such relationships. In those terms, the
era of contact set in motion a complex series of ecological interactions that
upended the Americas, as Europeans, Africans, and Asians began moving into
the hemisphere. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans had long acted as barriers
isolating the western hemisphere from ecosystems in the rest of the world. As
the oceanic barriers broke down after 1492, the resulting migrations created
6 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

frontiers, not only of people but also of plants and animals. Indeed, the plants
and animals frequently traveled in advance of human immigrants, and their
arrivals transformed existing ecosystems in fundamental ways. Finally, there
were also frontiers of microorganisms-frontiers of disease-which spread
with astonishing and deadly results.
Stories of first contact, then, are remarkably valuable, immensely complex,
and extremely difficult to sort out. De Soto's entry into North America-his
entrada, it is often called-was key. He and his followers were the first Euro­
peans to encounter native cultures throughout much of the southeastern inte­
rior. Furthermore, after De Soto's exploration, Europeans did not return to
that interior until the 1670s and 1680s. It was as if a curtain had been briefly
lifted with De Soto's arrival, to reveal an astonishing landscape of human,
animal, and plant ecologies in the Southeast-only to descend again for well
over a century. Historians and archaeologists have thus seized on the accounts
of the expedition in order to shed light on what America must have been like
not only during the era of contact, but also in the years leading up to it.

ENTRY INTO AN UNKNOWN WORLD

De Soto was born in 1500 in the province of Extremadura, an impoverished
region of Spain whose difficult conditions pushed many of its ambitious young
men to seek their fortunes overseas. Balboa, the conquistador who in 1513
crossed the Isthmus of Panama and viewed the Pacific Ocean, hailed from
Extremadura. So did Hernan Cortes, who marched into Mexico in 1519 and
brought down the Aztec empire. De Soto arrived in Castilla del Oro (present­
day Panama) when he was only fourteen. With his air of command, he soon
received the nickname "the Captain." Through his boldness he became
wealthy from the conquest of Panama and Nicaragua, partly by amassing gold
and silver, but more from leading slaving raids against the Indians.
By the time De Soto turned thirty, Cortes had found fame and fortune
by reducing the Aztecs and looting their treasures. Another Extremaduran,
Francisco Pizarro, cast his eye on the more recently discovered Incan civili­
zation in South America. In 1531 De Soto joined Pizarro's tiny army of 168
men, leading a vanguard of mounted horse. Pizarro boldly confronted the
monarch Atahualpa, despite the presence of a ceremonial Incan army num­
bering perhaps 80,000. As the two leaders faced off, De Soto played his own
dramatic part. On horseback, he rode directly up to Atahualpa to intimidate
him. Horses had become extinct in the Americas thousands of years ear­
lier, so these large creatures at first terrified many Indians. Deliberately, De
Soto crowded so close that when his horse snorted, it ruffled the ceremonial
fringe Atahualpa wore across his forehead. In an audacious surprise attack
of cannon, cavalry, lances, and swords, Pizarro scattered the terrified Incan
army while taking its king hostage. Then he demanded an entire roomful of
gold and silver as ransom in return for freeing Atahualpa. When Atahualpa
complied, Pizarro executed him anyway. De Soto shared in the ransom.
 Contact 7

Such conquests only whetted the appetite of "the Captain" for more.
De Soto returned to Spain to obtain the blessing of Emperor Charles V to
conquer new lands, looking this time to the north. Several expeditions to
La Florida had failed spectacularly, but as survivors straggled home, rumors
of treasure and riches spread. With the emperor's blessing, De Soto sailed to
Cuba. By May of 15 3 9 his ships lay off the coast of Florida, tacking in search
of a deep harbor where they could land.
What did those 600 Europeans see, looking onto the bay? A thick wall of
red mangroves spread mile after mile, some reaching as high as 70 feet, with
intertwined and elevated roots making landing difficult. And very soon "many
smokes" appeared "along the whole coast," billowing against the sky. The Indi­
ans had spotted the newcomers and were spreading the alarm by signal fires.
Inland from the coast, the environment of the Southeast was little like what
we would see today. In our mind's eye we must banish not only the highways,
buildings, and bridges, but also less obvious features. Except for Florida, the
southeastern part of the continent had many fewer lakes, which in modem times
have been created by dams. Though the climate was colder than at present when
De Soto arrived-and had been for over a century-the forest had actually
evolved in response to a hotter climate that dominated for centuries previously.
During those years, prevailing westerly winds dried out the vegetation, which
was regularly scoured by lightning fires. In many areas only trees resistant to
fire flourished, primarily longleaf pine, slash pine, and loblolly, spreading from
the southern end of Chesapeake Bay through much of Florida and westward
into present-day Mississippi. Such old-growth vegetation is scarce today.
The balance of wildlife was as different as the trees of the forest. Many
animals were much more common, including the predatory wolf and pan­
ther. Some birds have since become extinct, including the brightly hued
Carolina parakeet (the only parrot native to North America) and the ivory­
billed woodpecker, which stood a foot and a half tall.
The land looked different for another reason. What the Europeans viewed
as natural, the Indians had shaped and altered in a host of significant ways.
Fire was prime among them, because the first inhabitants of the Americas
used it for more than making "smokes" to communicate. Cabeza de Vaca, a
Spanish explorer who preceded De Soto by a decade, noted that the Ignaces
Indians of Texas went about

with a firebrand, setting fire to the plains and timber so as to drive off the
mosquitoes, and also to get lizards and similar things which they eat, to come
out of the soil. In the same manner they kill deer, encircling them with fires,
and they do it also to deprive the animals of pasture, compelling them to go for
food where the Indians want.

In California, where grass seeds were an important food, Indians burned

fields annually to remove old stocks and increase the yield. Along the Atlantic
Coast, Indians set fires to keep down the scrub brush. The resulting forest
was almost parklike, with large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and plenty
of succulent grasses.
8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Few European colonists understood the Indians' ecological role. Still, as

they penetrated the interior of North America over the next two centuries,
they were continually struck by the profusion of wildlife. "The aboundance of
Sea-Fish are almost beyond beleeving," noted an early settler of Massachusetts
Bay, "and sure I should scarce have beleeved it except I had seene it with mine
owne eyes." In Virginia, English settlers fording streams sometimes found
that the hooves of their horses killed fish,the rivers were so thick with them.
Governor Thomas Dale,in one setting of his net,hauled in 5,000 sturgeon.
As with fish, so with wildfowl. In Virginia the beating wings of ducks,
geese, brant, and teal sometimes sounded "like a great storm coming over
the water." And the number of passenger pigeons-a bird hunted into
extinction by 1914-astounded everyone. The famous naturalist,John James
Audubon, in 1813 watched vast flocks darken the sun along the banks of
the Ohio River. In "almost solid masses, they darted forward in undulating
and angular lines,descended and swept close over the earth with inconceiv­
able velocity,mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column,and,
when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines,
which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent." At night "the pigeons,
arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere ... it was a scene of uproar and
confusion. I found it quite useless to speak or even to shout to those persons
who were nearest to me."
Similar tales were told of mammals. Red and fallow deer congregated along
the Virginia coasts in the hundreds. Gray and black squirrels ate so much
of the colonists' grain that eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians killed more
than 600,000 squirrels in one year alone. On the prairies,an estimated 50 million
bison roamed in herds. Some of the creatures had moved east as far as Kentucky;
a few even pushed into Virginia along the Potomac River.Pronghorn antelope
may have outnumbered even buffalo. Beavers swelled the streams of eastern
forests as well as those of the Rockies, and grizzly bears "were everywhere,"
reported one mountain man early in the nineteenth century.
Thus the landscapes De Soto and his men entered in 1539 looked dif­
ferent for many reasons, including a changed climate, a greater variety and
abundance of species,and Indians shaping the environment.
But when the Europeans entered the Americas, they almost immediately
began to change the ecosystems they encountered. Newcomers brought with
them plants and animals that were foreign to the Americas, and they took
back American species to introduce to their home provinces. Historian Alfred
Crosby labeled this ongoing process the Columbian exchange. Many of the
introductions to the Americas were deliberate: crops such as wheat or grapes
that were favorites at home. Spaniards did not believe they could live without
bread and wine. In the Caribbean, Europeans imported lemons,oranges,and
figs. Banana trees from the Canary Islands "have multiplied so greatly that it
is marvelous to see the great abundance of them on the islands," wrote one
chronicler. In return, Europeans brought home American tomatoes, corn,
potatoes,peanuts, and beans-crops that over the next few centuries revolu­
tionized agriculture everywhere from Ireland to Italy to China.
 Contact 9

Other imports to the Americas were accidental. Seeds arrived in chests of

folded clothes or in clods of mud or dung. Many of these European plants
spread quickly because American plants had been relatively isolated from
competition for thousands of years and were pushed out by hardier European
stocks. Some plants spread so widely that today they are commonly taken to
be native. "Kentucky" bluegrass originated in Europe. So did the dandelion,
the daisy, white clover, ragweed, and plantain. (The last was called "the Eng­
lishman's foot" by New England Indians, for it seemed to sprout wherever
the new settlers wandered.)
We have already had one glimpse of how European animals unsettled
the western hemisphere: De Soto's horse breathing down Atahualpa's
neck-literally. The Spanish understood that their horses frightened
Indian opponents, and De Soto brought 200 to La Florida. The mounts
were likely a small but tough Arabian breed originating along Africa's Bar­
bary Coast, but sea transport was not an easy matter. To keep the animals
from panicking and rearing, they were suspended from the ceiling below
decks by canvas belts around
their bellies, so that their hooves Horses, not seen before by the
remained several inches above the Indians, were ofgreater strategic
decking. Once ashore, the horses advantage to De Soto than firearms.
were mounted by soldiers carry­
ing steel-tipped lances about 15 feet long. Indians on foot could not outrun
these lancers; the safest response was to flee to a swamp, where the horses
would flounder, or find shelter in canebrake or other thick vegetation.
Indian astonishment and fear soon turned to bravery and cunning. One
of the first of De Soto's horses to die was a mount shot by Indian bow and
arrow. The arrow sped with such strength, it pierced the horse's tightly
woven cloth armor and tore through the saddle, the arrow's shaft lodging
more than a third of the way into the animal's flesh. In the long run, Indians
took possession of stray horses and learned to ride them bareback.* In the
short term, though, De Soto and other newcomers used the horse and lance
to great tactical advantage.
De Soto also brought a number of large dogs, which the Indians learned to
fear. Conquistadors had used dogs in the Caribbean. De Soto's first master
there, the governor of Castilla del Oro, sponsored manhunts in which pris­
oners were set loose and, for sport, hunted down by dogs. In La Florida the
dogs would attack their Indian foes in pitched battles or chase after wounded
warriors and bring them down. (Some dogs were equipped with spiked or
metal collars, to make it difficult for those being attacked to choke them.)
Dogs proved useful on the march as well: their keen hearing and sense of
smell helped defend the Spanish against surprise attacks.

* By the nineteenth century, Comanche riders were so accomplished that in one friendly contest, a
unit of the U.S. Cavalry was disgusted to find its finest Kentucky mare beaten by a "miserable sheep
of a pony" upon which a Comanche rider was mounted backward so he could mockingly wave (with
"hideous grimaces") for his American rival to "come on a little faster!"
10 AFTER. THE FACT: T:e::s ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

At the the time of De Soto's death, the pigs accompanying the expedition
numbered more than 700. The animals were an efficient way of providing protein
to the expedition, but their importation into North America very likely sparked a
chain reaction of unintended consequences.

Finally, De Soto brought along pigs, a most efficient source of calories.

W'hen slaughtered, more than 80 percent of the carcass could be consumed,
compared with only 50 percent of a cow or sheep. Hogs could be herded
on the march, foraging for food as they went. Unlike today's pale domestic
pigs, they were black or gray, with long legs and long snouts. They used
sharp tusks to defend themselves and multiplied rapidly. In the Caribbean,
early explorers sometimes marooned several pigs on a small island,returning
a few years later for food after the swine had overrun the land. Inevitably,
some pigs escaped into the wild. "This day they lost many pigs," wrote one
of De Soto's chroniclers, the current having carried them off while crossing
a river. And some Indians snuck into the expedition's camp and poached
them for a meal themselves.

INTO THE Wooos

To understand De Soto's impact on the land, historians have tried to trace

his route, but the task is not easy.When the Spanish landed in 1539, they
understood little of North American geography. Earlier expeditions to La
Florida and the Carolina coast in 1S14 and 1521 believed these regions to be
islands, like Cuba and Hispaniola. Even if we knew where De Soto landed
(and that has been vigorously argued over), the descriptions of his overland
journey are vague. For example: "Tuesday, the twenty-third of September,
the G>vemor and his army left from N apituca, and arrived at the river of
the Deer." No Indian map or manuscript is available to locate Napituca; no
record of it survives other than from the expedition.As for the "river of the
Deer," that is merely a Spanish invention, so named "because the Indian
messengers ...brought there certain deer."
 Contact 11

Occasionally the accounts mention distances: "From [Patofa] to the port

of Espiritu Santo ... a distance of about three hundred and fifty leagues or
so." But this information opens up new puzzles, because in Spain, a league
might have referred to the legua legal, about 2.6 miles, or it might have meant
the legua comun, nearly 3.5 miles.Depending on the measure being used, 350
leagues could be 910 miles or 1,225.
Descriptions of physical features provide clues: the mention of mountains
or "rough pine groves, low and very swampy." And although names like
Napituca were unknown when Europeans settled in the region a century
later, others persisted. Apalachee, the first formidable chiefdom De Soto
reached, was also the name of the people later encountered by French settlers
near present-day Tallahassee, Florida.The anthropologistJohn R. Swanton,
head of a federal commission to reconstruct De Soto's route in 1936, explic­
itly assumed that "the Indian tribes encountered by De Soto ... preserved
the same locations down to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centu­
ries when English and French explorers and traders visited them."
Over the past 300 years, scholars have suggested at least a dozen alterna­
tive expedition routes. By the time Swanton's federal commission of 1936
attempted a definitive solution, the confusion was evident.
Swanton's route remained the accepted alternative until the 1980s.Then
anthropologist Charles Hudson began a reevaluation, taking advantage of a
wealth of archaeological studies underway.At Indian sites Swanton thought
might be along De Soto's route, new excavations revealed problems. For
Coosa, a prosperous chiefdom the Spanish visited in 1540, archaeologists
found Indian settlements at the site Swanton proposed, but none whose
remains reached back earlier than the eighteenth century.As scholars gained
a better picture of how Indian cultures had grown and spread, by studying
the layouts of villages, pottery styles, and other evidence, it became clear
that Swanton should not have assumed that an Indian tribe living at a certain
location in 1800 must have lived at the same place in 1500.
Of course this makes perfect sense, if we consider the more familiar ter­
ritory of recorded history. Imagine standing at the shoreline of Manhat­
tan in 1539, the year De Soto arrived off Florida.Then, the island is called
Scheyischbi-"the place bordering the ocean "-by the Lenape Indians living
there.A hundred years later the settlement is known as New Amsterdam and
is ruled by the Dutch. By 1739 it has become New York and is governed by
the English. Over 300 years Manhattan was much changed! Yet because so
little was known about the southeastern Indians of the sixteenth century, it
was all too easy for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to assume
that if the Cherokees or Apalachees were living at a certain place in 1739,
the same groups were living there several centuries earlier.If we have no evi­
dence of change, why not assume things stayed the same? It is perhaps only
human nature to make such assumptions.
By 1997 Hudson had in place what he believed was a more accurate
accounting of De Soto's wanderings, though he cautioned that he could not
identify with absolute certainty virtually any of his suggested sites along the
12 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HisTomCAL DETECTION

'

Panuco TampaBay ,�
Gulf of Mexico

�
� , ..... -

This map gives some idea of the range of routes attributed over the past
two centuries to the De Soto expedition. The most recent reconstruction, by
anthropologist Charles Hudson, suggests th.at De Soto landed in Tampa Bay.
The renmants of his expedition finally made their way along the Gulf coast to the
Spanish settlement of Panuco.

route. The expedition most likely landed in Tampa Bay on Florida's west
coast and, over the summer and fall of 1539, made its way north and west,
reaching the Apalachee town of Anhayca. (fhis site, located at present-day
Tallahassee, is one of the few locations that most reconstructions of the
journey agree on.)
As the expedition made its way into the interior, relations between the
Europeans and native Americans ranged through a mixture of friendship,
pretended friendship, suspicion, and outright hostility. De Soto's purpose,
after all, was to conquer rich Indian empires, just as Cortes and Pizarro had.
The most important questions he asked, once he entered a village, were
whether there were any chiefdoms in the region possessing gold, silver, or
other treasures, and whether the local chief could supply him with food for
600 people. These were not inquiries likely to encourage trust.
 Contact 13

This tiny bell-only 1 �inches wide-proved helpful in tracking De Soto's route

through the Southeast. Despite the many traces that 600 Europeans must have left
during their journey, archaeologists have until recently found few items that can
be linked not merely to Europeans, but to Europeans from the sixteenth. century.
The bell, found in northwest Georgia at the archaeological site known as Little
Egypt, is a distinctive sort the Spanish used on sixteenth-century horses such as
those De Soto brought. Other European artifacts from a variety of sites include
the iron arrowpoint of a crossbow, a horseshoe, a wrought-iron nail, and a sword.
Of course, just because an artifact is found in a particular place does not mean that
De Soto had been there. Indians could have carried the artifacts to nearby or even
distant locations. Still, such pieces of evidence are among the data used by Charles
Hudson and others to chart De Soto's approximate route.

In some cases, Indians did bring gifts of corn, squash, or other provisions,
as well as clothing or copper ornaments. Other settlements, hostile from
the outset, showered the Spanish with arrows and insults. Sometimes whole
villages simply fled into the woods until they could gain a better sense of
how the newcomers would behave. Often De Soto sent patrols on horse to
capture anyone who could be found. Then he would ask his captives to sum­
mon the local chief. When asking did not work, he would scour the neigh­
borhood until he found the chief, whom he then held hostage to ensure the
expedition's safety as it passed through a region.
The Spanish possessed crossbows and primitive muskets-"arquebuses"­
but these weapons provided little advantage in battle. In the time it took to
reload either the musket or crossbow, an Indian could shoot six or seven
arrows, using a large and powerful bow. A typical specimen was perhaps five
feet tall and as thick as a man's wrist. Apalachee archers aimed for cracks
in the Spanish armor, and their arrows were shot with such force that they
could penetrate a ttee to the depth of six inches or pierce a horse entirely.
The Indians seldom announced their intentions toward the sttangers. A
delegation bearing gifts might come primarily to assess Spanish fortifica­
tions and plan attacks. Sometimes an individual pretending to be the chief
14 AFTER THE FACT: THE AltT OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

In condemning many practices of the conquistadors, the Spanish priest

Bartolome de las Casas included information about De Soto's treatment of
noncooperative Indians. This illustration from the German edition of Las Casas's
book showed in one grisly scene the many cruelties employed.

would come, in order to protect the real leader. Indian guides might delib­
erately lead the expedition into swamps or thick canebrake. 'When De Soto
suspected such deceptions, he struck back ruthlessly, chopping off a guide's
hand or nose or, worse, throwing him to the dogs. The warriors never
flinched, pretending not to mind such punishments. And the chiefs were
often disdainful of the Spanish. "To me you are professional vagabonds,"
one is quoted as saying,

who wander from place to place, gaining your livelihood by robbing, sacking,
and murdering people who have given you no offense. I want no manner of
friendship or peace with people such as you. . . . I promise to maintain war
upon you so long as you wish to remain in my province, not by fighting in the
open, although I could do so, but by ambushing and waylaying you whenever
you are off guard.

After De Soto had occupied the town of Anhayca for his winter camp, the
Apalachees fled. But they continuously harassed De Soto, ambushing Span­
iards when they ventured too far afield and setting fire to the houses where
 Contact 15

they were staying. In the spring of 1540 De Soto resumed his march toward
a richer kingdom to the north named Cofitachequi. Traveling through
present-day Georgia, he crossed the Savannah River into what is now South
Carolina, demanding 400 Indian porters along the way from another chief­
dom. At Cofitachequi, several leaders in dugout canoes met him, including a
woman who was a paramount chief, a leader whose authority extended across
a broad territory of settlements. Soon after, another woman of importance
appeared, whom the Spanish referred to as "La Senora de Cofitachequi."
She arrived on a litter shaded by a canopy of white cloth and traveled in a
ceremonial canoe "with many trappings and ornaments."
The lady made a gift that pleased De Soto-a "great rope of pearls as
large as hazelnuts." He was interested in shiny yellow and white stones as
well, he told her, by which he meant gold and silver. The lady commanded
that such gifts be brought. But the "yellow" and "white" stones proved to
be only bits of copper and mica. As for pearls, La Senora directed him to a
mortuary, a sheltered building on stilts in which decomposing bodies of the
nobility were kept in boxes. The stench was overpowering, but the mortuary
had compensating rewards. In smaller woven-reed baskets were hundreds
upon hundreds of pearls. De Soto and his men carried off approximately 200
pounds of them, apparently with the lady's blessing.
Furthermore, the lady offered the expedition half of the village in which
to make camp. Cofitachequi was laid out in the same way as many of the
towns De Soto would visit, though it was more prosperous and elaborate.
A central plaza was anchored by one or more mounds, upon which the vil­
lage chief lived. Maize corn was central to this Mississippean culture. The
cultivation of maize spread throughout much of the Southeast after 800 CE,
producing agricultural surpluses that permitted more dense populations. In
the centuries before De Soto's arrival, these settlements increasingly united
under paramount chieftains whose sphere of influence encompassed many
villages. The paramount chief of Cofitachequi may have collected tribute
from the flanks of the Carolina mountains all the way to the mouth of the
Santee River along the Atlantic-"a hundred leagues, in which, as we saw,
she was very well obeyed," wrote one chronicler. Intermediate "great nobles"
administered portions of the chiefdom, each of these rulers known as a mico.
At the lowest level, a lesser noble known as an orata was in charge of one or
a few villages.
Many expedition members thought De Soto should begin his colony here.
The Indians seemed more "civilized" than others they had met-which was
to say, they showed a "desire to serve and please" the Spanish. That desire
did not last long, as the expedition ate its way through Cofitachequi's food
stores. "When La Senora decided to flee, De Soto held her hostage until he
headed north out of her lands, up the valley of the Wateree and Catawba
rivers and crossing over the southern Appalachians- "very rough and lofty
mountains." The pattern of encounter regularly repeated itself: greetings,
gifts, a tentative peace, then conflict. At Chiaha the flashpoint came when
De Soto demanded 30 Indian women as slaves for some of his men (who
16 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

'This modem reconstruction of Cofi.Uchequi shows the typical structure of a

Mississippian village, with its central plaza anchored by two mounds, one being the
residence of the village chieftain.

desired them for purposes "more than was proper"). At Coosa, where the
paramount chief again appeared on a litter and ordered his people to empty
their houses for the Spanish, De Soto put him in chains and the town fled.
But at the end of this second season in the country, he met more than he
bargained for in the person of Tascaluza, a paramount chief who lived near
present-day Montgomery, Alabama. The Spanish marveled at the stature of
the Indians of the region: they were much taller, and Tascaluza "seemed a
giant," towering a foot and a half over De Soto. He received the Europeans
from a ceremonial seat atop the
De Soto met more than he bargained plaza mound, and De Soto's lieu­
tenant Luis de Moscoso tried the
for in the person ofTascaluza, a
same maneuver De Soto had per­
paramount chiefwho towered a foot formed for Pizarro with the Incas,
and a half over many ofthe Spanish. riding horseback around the plaza
to intimidate the chief. Tascaluza
feigned indifference and even requested a horse to ride himself. He was so tall
for the small pony, however, that his legs hung down nearly to the ground.
While De Soto tried displays of horsemanship, T ascaluza offered dances
by his people in the plaza, which reminded the Spanish of "the way of the
 Contact 17

peasants of Spain, in such a manner that it was a pleasure to see." De Soto

then asked for Indian porters to carry the Spanish baggage, as well as women
for the men. Tascaluza refused and was put in irons, but after expressing his
displeasure, he seemed to accept his fate. Four hundred porters materialized;
the women De Soto demanded were waiting at the nearby town of Mabila,
Tascaluza promised. Messengers from Mabila brought cornbread seasoned
with chestnuts.
Mabila proved to be guarded by a stout palisade, and despite a celebration
of welcome, the houses on the plaza concealed Indian warriors. Hot words
between the Indians and the Spaniards led to a scuffle in which an Indian
had his arm chopped off. In an instant Tascaluza's men poured out. De Soto,
suspecting a trap, had nevertheless entered the walled village with a dozen
or so comrades and found himself surrounded. He barely fought free to the
outside, losing some of his men in the process. Meanwhile the Indians killed
a number of horses and dragged inside all the baggage that the 400 porters
had carried. Defiantly they emptied out clothing, food, supplies, and even the
200 pounds of pearls. The ensuing battle lasted the entire day, with perhaps
5,000 Indians showering the Spanish with arrows from behind their pali­
saded village. Eventually De Soto's men surmounted the fence and set fire
to the thatched huts, as hand-to-hand combat continued through a haze of
smoke and flames. Tascaluza's men urged their chief to flee, and he may have;
or he may have been killed-the records do not say. Once the palisade was
breached, however, Spanish lancers on horseback provided a decisive advan­
tage. Victory came at a steep cost: 22 killed and another 148 wounded, much
clothing gone, winter coming on-and De Soto's men ready to mutiny.
Many wanted to head south toward the gulf and leave La Florida to some­
one else. But De Soto had no intention of retreating without riches or an
empire subdued. It took another year of the same futile struggles: west in the
spring of 1541 to the Mississippi River, beyond it into present-day Arkansas
and the Ozark Mountains, finally encountering a chiefdom of fierce Indians,
the Tula, who fought the Spanish tooth and claw, driving the 350 or so sur­
viving members of the expedition back toward the Mississippi. After endur­
ing the harshest winter yet, with drenching cold rains and drifting snows,
De Soto returned to the thickly settled region around Anilco. There, in the
spring of 1542, he died.
Even then, the expedition consumed yet another year in a futile quest for
an overland route to Mexico. Only during the winter of 1542-1543 did the
men return to the Mississippi to build seven boats, in which to take their
chances with the big river. When the spring floodwaters rose and floated the
boats free, the Indians of Quigualtam were waiting, eager to ambush.
The Indians' canoes were not rustic birchbarks of the sort popular in the
modern American imagination. They were massive dugouts, hollowed and
shaped from the largest trees available. When Indians first met De Soto on
the river in May 1541, the paramount chief brought a fleet of about 200,
about 60 to 70 men aboard each craft and a canopy at the stern to shelter
18 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

its commander. The men were "painted with red ocher and having great
plumes of white and many colored feathers on either side [of the canoes] and
holding shields in their hands with which they covered the paddlers, while
the warriors were standing from prow to stern with their bows and arrows
in their hands." With "the feathers, the shields,and banners,and the many
men in them,they had the appearance of a beautiful fleet of galleys."
Their fighting abilities made them even more fearsome, as the seven
handmade Spanish boats began their escape downriver to "the great sea,"
each towing a small dugout canoe. Quigualtam sent forth perhaps 100 dug­
outs,the men singing and hallooing loudly.When Moscoso dispatched four
or five Spanish canoes to meet them,some Indians jumped out of their boats
into the water-half swimming to the lead Spanish canoe to capsize it, the
other half stabilizing their own canoes to prevent the Spanish from doing
the same. Eleven Spaniards drowned in the encounter. The larger Spanish
boats could not come to their aid because the river's current carried them
downstream. For the rest of the day, Quigualtam pursued, raining down
a hail of arrows and boasting in song that if the Spanish had risked being
"food for birds and dogs on land, in the river they would make them food
for the fishes."
So it proceeded down the river. Almost never did the Indians approach
close enough for hand-to-hand combat, but they would swarm from shore
in their dugouts,a new group taking the place of previous warriors once the
Spanish entered a new territory. "This same battle and strife ...proceeded
continuously for ten days and nights," explained one chronicler. He may
have exaggerated the extent of the attacks, but by the time the expedition
reached the Gulf of Mexico,its men were exhausted from the constant pad­
dling and skirmishing.It took another month and a half to reach the Spanish
settlement of Panuco,Mexico,in the summer of 1543.
The 311 survivors gave thanks to God,and some even began to think they
should have stayed and founded a colony. But while a few Spanish expedi­
tions probed the edges of North America over the next hundred years, no
Europeans reached the populous interior or the chiefdoms of Quigualtam
and Anilco, the many agricultural villages spreading around the Mississippi
with their plazas and mounds. It was only in 1682 that the French explorer
Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, swept down the broad river in
canoes,passing through the same country all the way to the gulf.
Except in La Salle's telling, that same country seemed hardly the same at
all. The French saw fewer than a dozen Indian villages along the way. For
2 00 miles at one stretch,there were
Where were the painted dugout none at all, "a solitude unrelieved
canoes, with six-ty wa'ffiors to each by the faintest trace of man," wrote
boat when La Salle paddled down the nineteenth-century historian
the Mississippi? Francis Parkman in recounting the
journey. La Salle did record herds
of bison wandering where open lands stretched along the river. But where
were the villages of the region that spread out "continually through land of
 Contact 19

open field, very well peopled with large towns," as one of De Soto's men put
it? "Where were the massed forces of Quigualtam and the other paramount
chiefdoms? "Where were the fleets of painted dugout canoes with their cano­
pies, their warriors harrying yet another set of newcomers from one bend in
the river to the next?
In 1543 thousands of Indians crowded into the territory. In 1682 there
seemed to be only a relative handful. And between those two accounts in the
historical record, there was silence. "Where had all the Indians gone?

THE QUESTION OF NUMBERS

To explain that contrast, historians have to answer basic questions about
population. How many Native Americans were living in North America
when Europeans first came into it? As we can see from the accounts of De
Soto's expedition, hundreds of diverse cultures spread across many areas of
the continent. But there are no written records, let alone anything as for­
mal as a census. How can historians even begin to calculate a precontact
population?
One method has been to collect, adjust, and average available estimates
from early European explorers and settlers. By proceeding region by region,
researchers can assemble numbers that provide an approximate total of
Indian inhabitants when Europeans arrived. During the early twentieth cen­
tury, anthropologist James Mooney did just that. His estimates, published in
1928, proposed a precontact North American population of approximately
1.1 million. A decade later, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber reduced the esti­
mate to 1 million or less. (Mooney's figures were "probably mostly too high
rather than too low," Kroeber asserted.) These figures were widely accepted
for decades, and appeared in many American history texts.
But if we examine Mooney's original notes, preserved at the Smithsonian
Institution, a disquieting pattern emerges. Mooney died before he could
publish his figures. For unstated reasons, the editor who did publish them
often reduced the totals by 5 or 10 percent. In addition, Mooney's numbers
were not necessarily what he believed to be the true precontact population­
merely a bedrock minimum. In many cases, his preliminary notes show even
larger totals, which he cautiously reduced for the final tally.
For example, in 1674 Daniel Gookin, a missionary, tried to calculate the
precontact population of New England. To do so, he asked Indian elders
to estimate the number of adult males each tribe could have called together
for a war in the years before Europeans arrived. The elders' total came to
18,000. Assuming that for every able-bodied male there might have been
three or four additional women, children, and old men, Gookin estimated a
New England population anywhere from 72,000 to 90,000. His number was
noted by a nineteenth-century historian, John Palfrey, but Palfrey lowered it
to about 50,000, for reasons never stated. Mooney cut that figure to "about
25,000 or about one-half what the historian Palfrey makes it."
20 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Of course, estimates varied. For the Massachusetts Indians alone, the

minister Edward Johnson in 1654 judged that the chiefdom had 30,000
"able men"-a number six times higher than Gookin's claim of 5,000 for
that tribe. Mooney laughed off Johnson's number as ridiculously high and
also rejected Gookin's ("his usual exaggeration"), instead settling on a figure
of 1,000 Massachusetts warriors, which was Gookin's estimate of the adult
male population in his own day, half a century after whites had arrived in
New England. Mooney did not explain his reasoning; he may have thought
Gookin's information about his own times was more accurate than numbers
supplied by elderly chiefs about bygone days when their tribes were sup­
posed to have been much more powerful.
Perhaps Gookin's number did reflect "his usual exaggeration." But when
such estimates are so imprecise to begin with, we may wonder whether
the results are being influenced by unstated assumptions. Why was it that
Mooney, Kroeber, and Palfrey virtually always reduced estimates rather than
increasing them? Could it have been partly because they viewed Indian soci­
eties as primitive and therefore unable to support larger populations? Palfrey
made no attempt to hide his disdain for Indian culture. "These people held a
low place on the scale of humanity," he wrote. Even though "it was said they
would run eighty or a hundred miles in a day," their "lymphatic tempera­
ment" led them to sink "under continuous labor."
Alfred Kroeber shunned the racism evident in Palfrey's remarks. Still, he
hesitated to accept the high-population estimates of many sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century observers. Indian societies in general, he explained, were
characterized by "insane, unending, continuously attritional" warfare, which
prevented tribes from becoming too large. Kroeber admitted that Indians
along the eastern lands of North America grew crops and that the practice of
agriculture in general encouraged larger populations. But the Indians along the
Atlantic "were agricultural hunters," not really "farmers," he argued. "Every
man, or his wife, grew food for his household. The population remaining sta­
tionary, excess planting was not practiced, nor would it have led to anything in
the way of economic or social benefit nor of increase of numbers."
"The population remaining stationary": here Kroeber's argument was
circular-for he possessed no hard information about whether the popu­
lation was expanding or decreasing. It must have remained stationary, he
assumed, because Indians were constantly fighting and lacked the skills to
expand. But we have already seen that as De Soto's hungry troops made their
way through the Southeast, they depended constantly on Indian surpluses.
Kroeber seems to have ignored evidence that did not fit his assumptions.
Indeed, the pattern of sharply cutting back older population estimates in
New England was repeated elsewhere in the hemisphere. Early-twentieth­
century scholars discounted Spanish estimates of 40 to 60 million Indians in
Central and South America. "To count is a modern practice," explained one
scholar; "the ancient method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed they
are always magnified." Those who proposed such hypotheses offered no con­
crete evidence of exaggeration.
 Contact 21

By the mid-1970s, many anthropologists and archaeologists had come to

believe that the conservative estimates were seriously flawed. They looked
for more accurate methods to calculate population. One involved projecting
numbers over a larger region by analyzing smaller areas in detail. In excavat­
ing an archaeological site, how many shelters or structures were constructed
on a village plaza? How far did the village extend? How broad and deep were
deposits of materials indicating a habitation: discarded shells, bones, or other
garbage? The mounds on village plazas were usually built up over decades,
with new houses being erected over the remains of older ones. A careful anal­
ysis of materials can help project population densities on a wider scale.
There is another method of projecting-of moving from the known to
the unknown. That is by projecting across time. The practice is known as
"upstreaming." As historian Daniel Richter explained,
Scholars take a cultural pattern for which they do have written documenta­
tion or firsthand evidence and project it backward in time-"upstream"-in a
period for which no such evidence exists.Thus, if we know that a seventeenth­
century Native American group lived in a particular kind of housing, and if a
fourteenth-century archaeological site shows a pattern of post molds match­
ing that style of housing, we can be fairly confident that people lived in simi­
lar dwellings in that earlier period. With slightly less confidence-but quite
responsibly-we can also assume that if this kind of house was home to a par­
ticular kind of family group in the seventeenth century, it was so in the four­
teenth century as well. Similarly, if we know that women were the people who
made ceramic pots in the seventeenth century, we assume that was the case in
the first century also. But the further back in time we try to upstream, the less
confidence we can have.

Upstreaming is an ingenious and

valuable technique. But-to be
"Upstreaming" is an ingenious and
frank-it is one that is used at
valuable technique-but also one used
least in part out of desperation.
With so little evidence, one grabs at least in part out ofdesperation.
at any available straw.
And we have already seen one example where upstreaming was not helpful:
Swanton's attempt to reconstruct De Soto's route. By upstreaming from
settlements in the eighteenth century, he wrongly assumed that the same
Indian tribes were living in the same places a century and more earlier. Other
archaeologists, especially in the Southwest, have calculated earlier population
density from information about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Pueblo
Indian dwellings. "It is no accident" that such techniques have been popular in
the Southwest, points out archaeologist Ann Ramenofsky, precisely because
the survival of some aboriginal groups into the twentieth century permits an as­
sumption of spatial continuity between prehistoric and historic populations ...
[I]f the number of people inhabiting a dwelling in the twentieth century is seven,
the assumption is that same number occupied a dwelling in the thirteenth
century.
22 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

That assumption, she pointed out, may underestimate the number of people
staying in a room or dwelling. On the other hand, using a count of village
sites can sometimes lead to overestimates. Many Indian groups lived in two
or three different locations, depending on where game or nuts and fruits
were available in different seasons. Three settlements do not necessarily
equal three different groups of people.
By the 1970s enough studies had been done to suggest that older esti­
mates of precontact population were markedly low. Rather than a popula­
tion of 8 to 14 million in North and South America, newer studies suggested
anywhere from 57 to 112 million, 5 to 10 million of whom lived north of
Mexico. If these figures are correct, when Columbus landed in 1492 on His­
paniola, that island alone was inhabited by as many as 7 or 8 million people,
compared with about 6 to 10 million for all of Spain. (England's population
at the time was only about 5 million.) The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan,
estimated to have held anywhere from 165,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, was
larger than the greatest European cities of the day: Constantinople, Naples,
Venice, Milan, and Paris. In fact, more people may have been living in the
Americas in 1492 than in western Europe.
For the southeastern regions of North America, more recent studies
(including Ramenofsky's) suggest a population decline of as much as 80 per­
cent between De Soto's entrada and La Salle's. That drop is immense. De
Soto's army disrupted dozens of societies on its march through North Amer­
ica. Several thousand Indians must have died in pitched battles at Mabila and
elsewhere along the way. Indians enslaved by the expedition perished from
malnutrition and harsh conditions, while other inhabitants starved after the
Spanish ate up their food stores. But those tragedies are a drop in the bucket
when placed against a population decline of 80 percent over the next hun­
dred years. What happened?

THE MIGRATION OF MICROBES

As De Soto's lieutenants collected pearls from the mortuary at Cofitachequi,
one glimpsed a different color flashing in the shadows: "a thing like a green
and very good emerald." He brought the object to De Soto. "My Lord," he
advised, "do not call anyone; it could be that there might be some precious
stone or jewel here." But when the "emerald" was brought into the daylight,
it proved to be made only of glass. That was even more of a puzzle. Indians
knew nothing of how to make glass. Inside the mortuary, De Soto's men
found other beads-even more striking, beads fashioned as rosaries. The
conclusion was inescapable: these were Spanish goods.
It did not take long to discover an explanation. Only two days' journey
from Cofitachequi, said the Indians, was the ocean-along the Carolina
coast. In 1526 an expedition led by Lucas Vazquez de Ayll6n had landed at
Winyaw Bay and exchanged trade goods there. These beads must be some of
them. De Soto's men noticed something else about Cofitachequi. Many of
the towns in the area were deserted, with weeds and trees growing up in the
 Contact 23

plazas. When asked, the Indians said that a great plague had come two years
earlier and wiped out many inhabitants.
Did Ayll6n unwittingly bring disease along with his glass beads? There
is no evidence to prove this. Arguing against the possibility, the epidemic
raged only two years earlier, according to the Indians, and Ayll6n's visit was
twelve years before that. The gap in time would seem too large to make the
connection. On the other hand, scholars have come to realize the ravages of
European diseases all across the western hemisphere after 1492.
Before 1492 Native Americans had never been exposed to smallpox, mea­
sles, malaria, or yellow fever. When their ancestors came to America tens of
thousands of years earlier, the migration cut them off from the major disease
pools of the world. In order to survive, disease-carrying microorganisms need
a population large and dense enough to prevent them from gradually run­
ning out of new hosts. Thus large cities or any large groups of people (armies,
schools) are prime disease pools. But the hunters who made their way over the
Asian land bridge to America migrated in small bands, and the cold climates
through which they passed served as a barrier to many disease-carrying micro­
organisms. As a result, Indians were not subjected to cycles of epidemics like
those that drastically reduced populations in Europe and Asia.
Because Europeans and Asians were periodically reexposed to diseases
such as smallpox, many developed immunities. For diseases such as measles,
protection was acquired during childhood (when the body is better able to
build immunity). By the sixteenth century, much of Europe's adult popula­
tion was protected when outbreaks reappeared.
For unprotected populations, however, such "virgin-soil" epidemics
were deadly. When the Pilgrim settlers arrived in New England in 1620,
they found cleared agricultural
fields and deserted villages, simi­
For unprotected populations, "virgin­
lar to those De Soto encountered
soil" epidemics ofsmallpox or other
around Cofitachequi. The Indian
villages near the Pilgrim settle­ diseases were deadly.
ments had experienced mortality
rates as high as 95 percent, and early colonists were often astonished to find
pile after pile of unburied bones, picked clean by the wolves and bleached
by the sun. The most likely cause was chicken pox European fishermen had
brought to American shores four years before the Pilgrims arrived.
More to the point, in De Soto's time Cortes was able to conquer the
mighty Aztec empire in large part because smallpox ravaged the capital of
Tenochtitlan. When the Spanish entered the conquered city, "the streets,
squares, houses, and courts were filled with bodies, so that it was almost
impossible to pass. Even Cortes was sick from the stench in his nostrils."
Last but not least, scholars have come to realize that in South America
De Soto and his commander Francisco Pizarro benefited from the diseases
that had decimated Incan settlements a half dozen years earlier. According to
one Spanish chronicle, "a great plague of smallpox broke out [around 1524
or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts
24 AFTER THE FACT: THE AltT OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

The pustules from

smallpox were horrifying
and painful. In their own
drawings, the Lakota
Sioux used a spiral symbol
to indicate the intense
pain associated with the
disease.

of the kingdom." Pizarro achieved his stunning victory because the Incan
people had been demoralized by disease and wracked by the civil war that
followed the death of their leaders.
Anthropologists like Mooney were aware of such diseases. But they had
not calculated how severely such epidemics could reduce total populations.
In the Southeast, however, a problem remains. Aside from the reference
to disease at Cofitachequi, the De Soto accounts mention Indian sickness
only three times in four years. H De Soto was responsible for spreading dis­
eases that led to widespread native depopulation, why is there no mention
of them?
To begin with, all diseases have an incubation period before the first vis­
ible symptoms appear. Because De Soto was often on the move, such symp­
toms may have surfaced only after he left an area. In this way, his men may
have spread sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis if they engaged
in conduct "more than was proper" in Cofitachequi and other chiefdoms.
Smallpox, too, could have been imported: the virus can actually survive in a
dried state for several years before emerging.
But Patricia Galloway and Ann Ramenofsky have suggested another ave­
nue of transmission. We have already noted that diseases flourish among
 Contact 25

dense populations. The same is true of epizootics among animals. Addition­

ally, diseases often make a jump from animals to humans, as happens with
modern influenza, which typically starts among Asian farm animals kept in
close quarters with humans. And as we have learned, there was a sizable pop­
ulation of hogs following the same route: 700 at one point.
Some, we know, escaped from the Spanish and ran off into the wild. And
Indians, the accounts indicate, occasionally stole swine for their own use.
"When humans constitute the sole reservoir [of a disease]," note Galloway
and Ramenofsky, "the infection tends to have a rapid onset and to last for
a short period of time. Infections from nonhuman animals are typically
longer-lived and may not ever be expressed in acute observable symptoms in
the [animal] reservoir." In other words, the pigs could have appeared healthy
while infecting the human population.
Furthermore, pigs are scavengers by nature, eating everything from nuts
to mice to garbage to human waste. That would have increased the chance
of passing along parasitical diseases, particularly in De Soto's winter camps,
where sanitary conditions worsened. Diseases like trichinosis could have been
passed along as pigs were butchered and eaten, or by drinking contaminated
water. Pigs also could have devastated Indian crops and, by reducing food
supply, left weakened human populations that were more prone to disease.
Thus despite the silences of a 140-year gap, scholars have been able to
gather the outlines of Indian societies dramatically disrupted. Very likely,
additional epidemics spread as Spanish expeditions made landfalls along the
edges of the continent in the decades after De Soto. Although it is diffi­
cult to pinpoint deaths from disease by examining grave sites, archaeologists
have found occasional telltales. The remains of many skeletons all laid on a
single bed of sand, for example, suggest a mass burial. Certainly the effects
of disease in later centuries illustrate the toll on Native Americans. During
the nineteenth century, as fur traders and pioneers crossed the Great Plains,
no fewer than twenty-seven epidemics decimated the continent: thirteen of
smallpox, five of measles, three of cholera, two of influenza, and one each of
diphtheria, scarlet fever, tularemia, and malaria. Loss of life ran anywhere
from 50 to 95 percent of the populations affected.
Those cases also demonstrated how disease undermined not just physical
health but the foundations of a culture. Virgin-soil epidemics proved most
deadly to those between the ages of fifteen and forty. Healthy, in the prime
of life, these victims were precisely those individuals who contributed the
most to a community's economy, as hunters, farmers, or food gatherers.
Socially, the disruptions were equally severe. Because male warriors were
among those hit hardest, hostile neighbors, either white or Indian, were
more difficult to resist. The plague-stricken Indians of New England had
"their courage much abated," reported one colonist; "their countenance is
dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." Near Charleston, South
Carolina, an Indian told a settler that his people had "forgotten most of their
traditions since the Establishment of this Colony, they keep their Festivals
and can tell but little of the reasons: their Old Men are dead."
26 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

AN ECOLOGICAL EDEN?
La Salle's Mississippi River carved its way through a world vastly different
from the one De Soto explored 140 years earlier. The plaza and mound
cultures had disappeared; Indian population had diminished sharply. The
Columbian exchange of Indian and European flora and fauna had been
underway for nearly two centuries. Not only had pigs and horses entered
the American landscape, Indians along the lower Mississippi served La Salle
melons, pomegranates, peaches, pears, and apples-fruits brought to the
Americas by Europeans. How these plants made their way to the lower Mis­
sissippi by 1682 is not clear; archaeological evidence suggests that Indian
traders may have brought them from the orchards of Spanish missions in
northern Mexico.
Once again we are reminded that history is about change and that in the
era of contact, historians have underestimated the amount of change, assum­
ing Indian societies were relatively stable over long periods of time. The vast
majority of recent research suggests that disruption and discontinuity were a
central part of the precontact era and that they accelerated after 1492, often
in unpredictable ways.
One final example demonstrates the point. It centers not on hogs, a Euro­
pean import, but on the classic American buffalo, master of the continent's
open spaces. La Salle reported bison "grazing in herds on the great prai­
ries which then bordered the [Mississippi]," as Francis Parkman put it. As
we noted earlier, 50 million bison may have roamed North America, with
seventeenth-century colonists spotting some as far east as the Potomac River
in Virginia. They were but one example of the abundant wildlife that led
some Europeans to portray America as a kind of Eden, a natural paradise full
of wild creatures of every sort.
Strange to say, 140 years earlier De Soto's expedition wandered 4,000
miles across the Southeast and well beyond the Mississippi into Arkansas
and the Ozarks and never reported seeing a single bison. Buffalo were cer­
tainly around: at the westernmost reach of the expedition's travels, the Span­
ish went looking for "cows" (bison had not yet become the accepted term).
But the herds were never sighted, only buffalo hides in the western Indian
settlements. Where were the herds that La Salle viewed without traveling
half as far?
Was it a coincidence that in 1682, after the Indian population had drasti­
cally decreased, that the bison pop­
ulation seemed to have increased? "Was it a coincidence that when the
A number of ecologists have sug­
Indian population was in drastic
gested that precisely because the
animal's most dangerous predators­
decline, the bison population had
humans-declined, the buffalo expanded greatly?
population surged. Our model of
the region's ecology should not assume a static situation. Bison, too, have a
history that must incorporate change!
 Cont11a 27

During the early nineteenth century, Audubon described huge flocks of

passenger pigeons that darkened the skies with their numbers. But can we reliably
"upstream" such numbers to the precontact era? Recently some ecologists have
questioned that assumption.

When we spoke earlier about a land of abundance-the multitudes of fish,

beavers, squirrels, and wildfowl encountered by Europeans-the descrip­
tions came from an earlier version of this chapter we wrote in 1985. The
latest research on bison suggests that the abundant herds were not present in
1492 and that our picture of that era was distorted. In fact, virtually all the
evidence we provided of the abundance of wildlife in precontact America
depended on a kind of unspoken upstreaming. The colonists recording the
abundant sturgeon in the rivers, the huge numbers of wildfowl, beavers, and
squirrels, were early settlers, to be sure. But "early" in this case means the
seventeenth century, which is still more than a hundred years after Colum­
bus. As for the passenger pigeons darkening the skies, these were described
by Audubon in 1813. Was it possible that 3 00 years before Audubon, differ­
ent conditions applied?
If Indians had been hunting and eating passenger pigeons in 1500, archae­
ologists would expect to find pigeon bones when excavating older sites.
Very few turn up. "What happened was that the impact of European con­
tact altered the ecological dynamics in such a way that the passenger pigeon
[population] took off," archaeologist Thomas Neumann has suggested.
28 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

North America was so thickly settled by Indians before contact that they
kept the pigeon population under control. The massive flocks of 1813 were
"outbreak populations-always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted
ecological system."
Indeed, our species-Homo sapie ns-had become what ecologists refer to
as a keystone predator. Just as a keystone keeps the arch of a doorway in
place, human predators at the top of the food chain influenced a host of
plants and animals below them. Passenger pigeons, for example, eat mast,
the nuts of forest trees that fall to the ground: acorns, beechnuts, hazel­
nuts, and chestnuts. Audubon described how pigeons could descend on a
field like a devouring plague, leaving nothing in their wake. They were such
a threat in Canada that the bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated the
passenger pigeon in 1703 ! Since Indians depended on mast for much of their
diet, these birds were competing with humans for the same food. So were
other animals such as turkeys, raccoons, deer, and squirrels, which also ate
mast. Neumann has noted that, unlike passenger pigeons, the bones of these
"competitors" show up regularly in settlement excavations. By eating their
competitors, Indians ensured that there was more mast to eat as well.
Not only that, Indians hunted in a way that worked to reduce the popu­
lations of these species. They hunted pregnant does in the spring, making
it harder for young deer to replenish the population. Turkeys, too, were
killed before they could lay eggs studies suggest a similar pattern of outbreak
populations. In Calilfornia, during the early 1800s noted the abundance of
sea otter, shellfish, grizzly bears, elk, and antelopes. But these populations
seem to have ballooned only after earlier epidemics decimated their human
predators.
Some archaeologists contest these findings, but the evidence has steadily
gained acceptance. If true, the new hypothesis turns our conception of pre­
contact America nearly on its head. The abundant wildlife witnessed by
so many European colonists was not a part of America before the dawn of
history. It was actually new, the large populations a direct consequence of
immigrants arriving from across the Atlantic.
All historians seek in their narratives an appropriate balance between
change and continuity. Some institutions persist for centuries and evolve
only gradually. But in the contested era of contact, change was dramatic, even
catastrophic. In the centuries after 1491, populations throughout the western
hemisphere dropped by anywhere from 50 to 90 percent. Ecosystems were
altered and uprooted as the Columbian exchange transformed landscapes
across the globe. De Soto and his followers provide a remarkable glimpse into
the lost worlds of Cofitachequi, Tascaluza, and Apalachee, as well as a win­
dow on the uneasy, often violent interactions that sparked those changes.
Inevitably, the reconstruction goes on. "Whether we like it or not, his­
tory is continually being reinvestigated and reconstructed. "What we know
about sixteenth-century America-or to be properly humble, what we think
we know-is different today from what it was twenty years ago. No wonder
we need revisions.
 Contact 29

11-
I
cougar

pige�
:
:
Indian II
1111 I
I

111 11
cor � i=;
' �=t.:1, ======EE8Sl ====:::Dtt:=tt=== 11 hu mans
J
I

• --
: : 11 7 �"
� ::: � ,#
II
persimmon • •
I
m elk ,,

�
-
,,

/� r:
. Yr(' bear
__/_ -1 1 I
shellfish -t
-t--' 1 ----
-- J
·-·-· -beave�
I ll I

I, 11, ,
I
�I
4-;
:
. r c•rniv::t
small _

�-- he��:�re I
�==========
I J
, •qa- ����1
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fish :....
>•· --------�

l__::::.� --------�

This chart shows humans as keystone predators atop the food chain. Because
Indians depended on mast and corn, it was in the their interest to limit the number
of competing predators for such food. (Adapted from Thomas Neumann, "The
Role of Prehistoric Peoples in Shaping Ecosystems in the Eastern United States,"
in Charles E. Kay, ed., Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the
Original State ofNature, Salt Lake City, 2002, p. 156.)
30 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (Athens, GA, 1997),
provides the best account of the DeSoto entrada and its encounter with
the many Indian chiefdoms of the Southeast. Only four primary-or near­
primary-sources recounting the expedition have survived. They are pre­
sented in Lawrence A. Clayton, VernonJames KnightJr., Edward C. Moore,
eds., The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North
America in 1539-1543, 2 vols. (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1993). For a broader survey
of Indian cultures on the eve of contact and after, see Charles C. Mann's
excellent 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York,
2006). Mann's book gives a good sense of the controversies and debates
over what we know about the era of contact; as does a collection of essays
edited by Patricia Galloway about the De Soto expedition, specifically The
Hernando De Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the
Southeast, new edition (Lincoln, NE, 2005).
CHAPTER 2

Serving Time in Virginia

Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith's life, as everyone knows. Or

did she? What we know about the ''facts" of the case depends on the
perspectives wrapped around those facts.

As has become clear, the historian's simple act of selection always separates
"history" from "the past." The reconstruction of an event is clearly different
from the event itself. Yet selection is only one in a series of interpretive acts
that historians perform as they go about their business. Even during the first
stages of research, when the historian is still gathering information, inter­
pretation and analysis are necessary. That is because the significance of any
piece of evidence is seldom apparent at first glance. The historian quickly
learns that the words evidence and evident rarely amount to the same thing.
For historians trying to reconstruct an accurate picture of the first Eng­
lish settlements in Virginia, the difficulty of taking any document at face
value becomes quickly apparent. The early Virginians were, by and large, an
enterprising lot. They gave America its first representative assembly, gave
England a new and fashionable vice (tobacco), and helped establish slavery
as a labor system in North America. These actions raise perplexing questions
for historians. Yet the answers to them cannot be found in the surviving
source materials without a good deal of work.
Take, for example, the case of Captain John Smith, a well-known Virgin­
ian who was enterprising enough to write history as well as make it. Smith
wrote an account of the young colony entitled A Generali Historie of Virginia,
published in 1624. Much of his history is based on eyewitness, firsthand
knowledge. At the vigorous age of twenty-seven, he joined the expedition in
1606 sent by the Virginia Company of London and played a crucial role in
directing the affairs of the inexperienced Jamestown colony.
Yet Smith's evidence cannot be accepted without making some basic
judgments. Most obvious-is he telling the truth? If we are to believe his
own accounts, the captain led a remarkably swashbuckling life. Before join­
ing the Virginia expedition, he had plunged as a soldier of fortune into a
string of complicated intrigues in central Europe. There he waged desperate
and brave warfare on behalf of the Hungarian nobility before being taken
prisoner by the Turks. Once a prisoner, he was made a slave to a young but

31
32 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

"noble Gentlewoman" with the romantic name of Charatza Tragabigzanda.

The smitten princess "tooke (as it seemed) much compassion" on Smith. But
alas, her sadistic brother insulted and taunted the captain so much that Smith
lost his temper one day, "beat out [his] braines" with a bat, and made a daring
escape, reaching England in time to sign on with the Virginia Company.
In Virginia the adventures came nearly as thick and fast. While the
colony's governing council quarreled at Jamestown, Smith went off on an
exploring mission. He established the first European contact with many of
the Indian tribes around Chesapeake Bay, bought some much-needed corn
from them, and was captured by a party of Indians loyal to Powhatan, the
principal chief in the region. Facing execution, Smith once again managed
to win the affections of a beautiful princess-this one, Powhatan's young
daughter Pocahontas.
How much of this romantic adventure do we believe? The tone of Cap­
tain Smith's account demonstrates that he was not the sort of man to hide
his light under a bushel. (In writing of his adventures, he compared himself
with the Roman general Julius Caesar.) Indeed, several nineteenth-century
scholars, including Henry Adams, challenged Smith's account of his Indian
rescue. Adams pointed out that the Pocahontas story did not appear in
Smith's earliest published descriptions of the Virginia colony. Smith proba­
bly inserted the story into the Generali Historie later, Adams argued, in order
to enhance his reputation.
Yet other historians have defended Smith, Philip Barbour among them.
Barbour checked Smith's tales against available records in both Hungary
and England and found them generally accurate as to names, places, and
dates. Smith claimed, for example, that he used an ingenious system of
torch signals to coordinate a nighttime attack by his Hungarian friends,
"Lord Ebersbaught" and "Baron Kisell." No other records mention Smith's
role, but we do know such an attack was launched-led by two Hungar­
ians named Sigismund Eibiswald and Jakob Khissl. Similarly, although the
records show no princess named Charatza Tragabigzanda, that may have
been Smith's fractured pronunciation of the Greek koritsi (girl) Trapedzoun­
dos (from Trebizond). Possibly, when he tried to discover the identity of his
new mistress, someone merely replied that she was korit:si Trapedzoundos-a
"girl from Trebizond."
Yet even if we grant Smith's honesty, significant problems remain-problems
common to all historical evidence. To say that Smith is truthful is only to say
that he reported events as he saw them. The qualification is not small. Like
every observer, Smith viewed events from his own perspective. When he
described the customs of the Chesapeake Indians, for instance, he did so as
a seventeenth-century Englishman. Behind each observation he made stood
a whole set of attitudes and opinions that he took for granted. His descrip­
tions were necessarily limited by the experience and education-or lack of
it-that he brought with him.
The seriousness of these limitations becomes clearer if we take a hypo­
thetical example of what might happen if Captain Smith were to set down
 Serving Time in Virginia 33

a history, not of Indian tribal customs, but of a baseball game between the
Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees:

Not long after, they tooke me to one of their greate Counsells, where many of
the generalitie were gathered in greater number than ever I had seen before.
And they being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their
greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets
and breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their Chestes, and wearinge
uppon their heades caps of a deep navy blue, with billes, of a sort I know not
what. One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at his pleasure hurl a
white ball at another chief, whose attire was of a different colour, and whether
by chance or artyfice I know not the ball flew exceeding close to the man
yet never injured him, but sometimes he would strike att it with a wooden
club and so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his club and run away.
Such actions proceeded in like manner at length too tedious to mention, but
the generalitie waxed wroth, with greate groaning and shoutinge, and seemed
withall much pleased.

Obviously Smith would make a terrible writer for the New York Post. (We
don't even know if the Yankees won!) But before concluding anything more,
compare the description of the baseball game with an account by the real
Smith of what happened to him after his capture. (Smith writes in the third
person, referring to himself as "he" and "Captain Smith.")

At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their

Emperor.... Before a fire upon a seat like a bedsted, [Powhatan] sat covered
with a great robe, made of Rarowcun skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by.
On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and along on each
side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all
their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the
white down of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayne of
white beads about their necks.At his entrance before the King, all the people
gave a great shout.The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him
water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead
of a Towell to dry them. Having feasted him after their best barbarous man­
ner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great
stones were brought before Powhatan.Then as many as could layd hands on
him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with
their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter,
when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne
upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he
should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper.

If we had not first read the account of the baseball game, it would not
be nearly as obvious just how little Smith has told us about what is going
on here. Indeed, anyone who reads any of the captain's writings will be
impressed by their wealth of detail. But that is because we, like Smith, are
unfamiliar with the rituals of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Indians.
34 An-ER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

"And being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings
dearest daughter ... got his head in her arm.es, and laid her owne upon his to save
him from death." The tale has been passed down as a romantic rescue, but from
Powhatan's point of view, was this event an adoption ceremony designed to cement
a political alliance?

Quite naturally-almost instinctively-we adopt Smith's point of view as

our own. And that point of view diverts us from asking questions to which
Smith does not have the answer. What, after all, is the reason the Indians
painted their heads and shoulders red and wore white down on their heads?
We know no more than we did about baseball players who were described as
wearing bright outfits with letters woven upon their chests.
More to the point, consider the fonn of Smith's narrative as it has been
passed down to us. The good captain is about to die until rescued at the last
moment by "the Kings dearest daughter." Does the story have a familiar
echo? Indeed-it strongly resembles Smith's being pitied by Princess Tra­
gabigzanda. Equally important, the story has become prominent in our folk­
lore because the nineteenth century delighted in such romantic tales: a pure
 Serving Time in Virginia 35

and noble-born woman saves the life of a brave commoner. Smith tells a
story that fits a narrative pattern we love to hear.
But what if we lay aside Smith's narrative perspective and consider the
same facts from Powhatan's point of view? That chief led a confederacy of
Algonquian Indians spread out around Chesapeake Bay. But his control over
the lesser chiefs in the area varied. Some tribal groups resisted paying tribute
to him; others at a greater distance showed no allegiance and were rivals.
Into this situation stepped Smith, along with the strange new tribe of
white people who had just arrived from across the Atlantic. In hindsight,
we see the arrival of Europeans as
a momentous event that changed "Was Powhatan� threatened
North America radically. But "execution" actually an adoption
from Powhatan's point of view? ceremony?
Here was simply another new
group of people-strange indeed, but people he would have to figure into
the balance of his own political equation. Should he treat the newcomers
as allies or enemies? Some historians and anthropologists have suggested
that Powhatan's behavior toward Smith was a kind of ritualized adoption
ceremony and that Smith's supposed execution was a kind of initiation rite
in which the captain was being ritually humiliated and subordinated. Once
Smith passed the test of bravery in the face of apparent death, Powhatan was
willing to adopt him as a vassal. As Smith himself puts it, Powhatan decides
his prisoner can "make him hatchets" and "bells, beads, and copper" for
Pocahontas.
Powhatan's later actions also suggest that he now considered Smith a chief,
or werowance, over this new tribe of English allies. Two days later, the chief
told Smith "now they were friends" and that Smith should go to Jamestown
and send back "two great gunnes, and a gryndstone"-just as other Indian
allies supplied Powhatan with tribute. In return, Powhatan would give Smith
land and treat him "as his sonne."
This interpretation of Smith's capture and adoption must remain specula­
tive, but it is responsible speculation, informed by historical and anthropo­
logical study of the ways of Algonquian Indians. And we would have been
blind to the interpretation without having separated Smith's useful informa­
tion from the narrative perspective in which it came to us.
It is easy enough to see how a point of view is embedded in the facts of
someone's narration. But consider for a moment evidence recorded by one
of the lowly clerks whose jottings constitute the great bulk of history's raw
material. The following excerpts are taken from the records of Virginia's
general assembly and the proclamations of the governor:

We will and require you, Mr.Abraham Persey, Cape Marchant, from this daye
forwarde to take notice, that ... you are bounde to accepte of the Tobacco
of the Colony, either for commodities or upon billes, at three shillings the
beste and the second sorte at 1 Sd the punde, and this shalbe your sufficient
dischardge.
36 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Every man to sett two acres corn (Except Tradesmen following their trades)
penalty forfeiture of corn & Tobacco & be a Slave a year to the Colony. No
man to take hay to sweat Tobacco because it robs the poor beasts of their fod­
der and sweating Tobacco does it little good as found by Experience.
In contrast to Smith's descriptions, these excerpts present small bits of
information. To understand them, we need a lot more knowledge of what's
going on. "Whereas Smith attempted to describe the Indian ceremony in
some detail because it was new to him, Virginia's general assembly knows
all too much about tobacco prices and the planting of corn. Policy is stated
without any explanation, just as the box score in the paper lists the single
line, "Yankees 10, Red Sox 3." In each case the notations are so terse, the
"narratives" so brief, that the novice historian is likely to assume they con­
tain no point of view, only the bare facts.
But the truth is, each statement has a definite point of view that can be
summed up as simple questions: (1) Did the Yankees win and if so by how
much? (2) Should the price of tobacco be three shillings or eighteen pence
or how much? (3) "What should
Even the "bare facts" come attached colonists use hay for? And so on.
to a perspective. These viewpoints are so obvious,
they would not bear mentioning­
except that, unconsciously, we are led to accept them as the only way to think
about the facts. Because the obvious perspective often appears irrelevant, we
tend to reject the information as not worth our attention.
But suppose a fact is stripped of its point of view. Suppose we ask, in effect,
a completely different question of it. Historians looking back on twentieth­
century America would probably learn little from baseball box scores, but at
least by comparing the standings of the 1950s with those of the 1970s, they
would discover that the Giants of New York had become the Giants of San
Francisco and that the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles. If they
knew a bit more about the economic implications of major-league baseball
franchises, they could infer a relative improvement in the economic and cul­
tural status of the West Coast. Similarly, historians can use the evidence
of tobacco prices or corn planting to make inferences about economic and
cultural conditions in seventeenth-century Virginia.
Using that approach, historians have taken documents from colonial Vir­
ginia, stripped them of their original perspectives, and reconstructed a striking
picture of Virginia society. Their research reveals that life in the young colony
was more acquisitive, raw, and deadly than most traditional accounts assumed.
Between the high ideals of the colony's London investors and the shallow
harbors along the Chesapeake, something went wrong. The society that was
designed to be a productive and diversified settlement in the wilderness devel­
oped into a world in which the single-minded pursuit of one crop-tobacco­
made life nasty, brutish, and short. And the colony that had hoped to pattern
itself on the traditional customs of England instead found itself establishing
something remarkably different: the institution of human slavery.
 Seroing Time in Virginia 37

A COLONY ON THE EDGE OF RUIN

No English colony found it easy to establish itself along the Atlantic Coast,
but for the Virginia colony, the going was particularly rough. In the colony's
first ten years, £75,000 was invested to send around 2,000 settlers across the
ocean to what Captain Smith described as a "fruitfull and delightsome land"
where "heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for mans habi­
tation." Yet at the end of that time, the attempt to colonize Virginia could be
judged nothing less than an unqualified disaster.
Certainly, most members of the Virginia Company viewed it that way. In
1606 King James had granted a charter to a group of London merchants who
became formally known as "The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers
and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia." The
Virginia Company, as it was more commonly called, allowed merchants and
gentlemen to "adventure," or invest, money in a joint stock arrangement,
pooling their resources to support an expedition to Virginia. The colony
would extract the riches of the new country, such as gold or iron, and also
cultivate valuable crops, such as grapes (for wine) or mulberry trees (used in
making silk). King James, a silkworm buff, even donated some of his own
specially bred worms. The proceeds would repay the company's expenses,
the "adventurers" would reap handsome pro.fits, the colonists would pros­
per, and England would gain a strategic foothold in the Americas. So the
theory went.
The reality was rather different. After four hard months at sea, only 105
of the original 144 settlers reached Chesapeake Bay in April of 1607. The
site chosen at Jamestown for a fort was swampy, its water unhealthy, and the
Indians less than friendly. By the end of the first hot and humid summer, 46
more settlers had perished. When the first supply ship delivered 120 new
recruits the following January, it found only 38 men still alive.
Part of the failure lay with the colony's system of government. A presi­
dent led a council of 13 men, but in name only. Council members refused
to take direction and continually bickered among themselves. In 1609 a new
charter placed centralized control with a governor, but when another 600
settlers set off, a hurricane scattered the fleet and only 400 settlers arrived,
leaderless, in September of 1609. Captain Smith, the one old hand who had
acted decisively to pull the colony together, was sent packing on the first
ship home. And as winter approached, the bickering began anew.
Nobody, it seemed, had planted enough corn to last through the winter.
Settlers preferred to barter, bully, or steal supplies from the Indians-just as
De Soto had, seventy years before. And the Indians knew that the English
depended on them-knew that they could starve out the newcomers sim­
ply by moving away. When several soldiers stole off to seek food from the
natives, the other settlers discovered their comrades not long after, "slayne
with their mowthes stopped full of Breade," killed as a taunt to those who
might come seeking food.
38 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

As the winter wore on, the store of hogs, hens, goats, sheep, and horses
were consumed; the colonists then turned to "doggs Catts Ratts and myce."
Conditions became so desperate that one man "did kill his wife, powdered
[i.e., salted] her, and had eaten part of her" before leaders discovered his vil-
lainy and had him executed. By May 1610,
So thin that they looked like when Deputy Governor Thomas Gates
skeletons . . . and the rest of the original fleet limped in
from Bermuda, only 60 settlers had sur­
vived the winter, and these were "so Leane thatt they looked Lyke Anota­
mies Cryeing owtt we are starved We are starved."
Grim as such tales are, we have almost come to expect them in the first
years of a new colony. But as the years passed, the colonists seemed to learn
little. Ten years after the first landing, yet another governor, Samuel Argall,
arrived to find Jamestown hardly more than a slum in the wilderness: "but
five or six houses [remaining standing], the Church downe, the [stockade
fence] broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the
Storehouse they used for the Church; the market-place and streets, and all
other spare places planted with Tobacco." Of the 2,000 or so settlers sent
since 1607, only 400 remained alive. Even John Rolfe, an optimist among
the settlers, could not help taking away with the left hand the praises he
bestowed with the right. "Wee found the Colony (God be thanked) in good
estate," he wrote home hopefully, "however in buildings, fortyfications,
and of boats, much ruyned and greate want." It was not much of a progress
report after ten years.
In England, Sir Edwin Sandys was one of the adventurers who watched
with distress as the company's efforts went nowhere. Sandys lacked the
financial punch of bigger investors such as Thomas Smith, who consid­
ered the Virginia enterprise just one venture among many: the East India
Company, trading in the Levant, and the Muscovy Company. If Virginia
did not pay immediate dividends, they could afford to wait. Sandys and his
financially strapped followers pressed for immediate reform, and in 1619
succeeded in electing him treasurer of the company. With real power in
his hands for the first time, Sandys set out to reconstruct the failing colony
from the bottom up.

BLUEPRINT FOR A VIRGINIA UTOPIA

Sandys knew that to succeed, he would have to attract both new investors to
the company and new settlers to the colony. Yet the Virginia Company was
deeply in debt, and the colony was literally falling apart. In order to recruit
both settlers and investors, Sandys offered the only commodity the company
possessed in abundance-land.
In the first years of the colony, Virginia land had remained company land.
Settlers who worked it might own shares in the company, but even so, they
did not profit directly from their labor. All proceeds went directly into the
 Serving Time in Virginia 39

treasury, to be divided only if there were any profits. There never were. In
1617 the company changed its policy. Old Planters, the settlers who had
come to Virginia before the spring of 1616, were each granted 100 acres
of land. Freemen received their allotment immediately, while those settlers
who were still company servants received their land when their terms of
service expired.
Sandys lured new investors with the promise of property too. For every
share they purchased, the company granted them 100 acres. More impor­
tant, Sandys encouraged immigration to the colony by giving investors
additional land if they would pay the ship passage of tenant laborers. For
every new tenant imported to Virginia, the investor received 50 additional
acres. Such land grants were known as "headrights" because the land was
apportioned per each "head" imported. Of course, if Old Planters wished
to invest in the company, they too would receive 100 acres plus additional
50-acre headrights for every tenant whose passage they paid. Such incen­
tives, Sandys believed, would attract funds to the company while also pro­
moting immigration.
And so private property came to Virginia. This tactic was the much­
heralded event that every schoolchild is called upon to recite as the salva­
tion of the colony. "When our people were fed out of the common store
and labored jointly together, glad was he could slip away from his labour, or
slumber over his taske," noted one settler. But "now for themselves they will
doe in a day" what before they "would hardly take so much true paines in a
weeke." It is important to understand, however, that the company still had
its own common land and stock from which it hoped to profit. Thus a com­
pany shareholder had the prospect of making money in two ways: from any
goods marketed by company servants working company lands, or directly
from his newly granted private lands.
There were other openings for private investment. By 1616 the company
had already granted certain merchants a four-year monopoly on providing
supplies for the colony. The "magazine," as it was called, sent supply ships
to Virginia, where its agent, a man known as the "cape merchant," sold the
goods in return for produce. In 1620 the company removed the magazine's
monopoly and allowed other investors to send over supply ships.
Sandys and his friends also worked to make the colony a more pleasant
place to live. Instead of being governed by martial law, as the colony had
since 1609, the company created an assembly with the power to make laws.
The laws would be binding so long as the company later approved them.
Inhabitants of the various company settlements were to choose two members
each as their burgesses, or representatives. When the assembly convened in
1619, it became the first representative body in the English colonies.
Historians have emphasized the significance of this first step in the evolu­
tion of American democracy. But the colony's settlers may have considered
it equally important that the company had figured out a way to avoid sad­
dling them with high taxes to pay for their government. Again the answer
was land, which the company used to pay officials' salaries. The governor
40 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

received 3,000 acres plus 100 tenants to work them, the treasurer received
1,500 acres and 50 tenants, and so on. Everybody won, or so it seemed. The
officers got their salaries without having to "prey upon the people"; the set­
tlers were relieved "of all taxes and public burthens"; and the sharecropping
tenants, after splitting the profits with company officials for seven years, got
to keep the land they worked. If the company carried out its policy, John
Rolfe observed enthusiastically, "then we may truly say in Virginia, we are
the most happy people in the world."
In 1619, with the reforms in place, the company moved into high gear.
New investors sent scores of tenants over to work their plantations; the
company sent servants to tend officers' lands; and lotteries throughout
England provided income to recruit ironmongers, vine-tenders, and glass­
blowers. The records of the Virginia Company tell a story of immigration
on a larger scale than ever before. Historians who do a little searching and
counting in company records will find that some 3,570 settlers were sent
to join a population that stood, at the beginning of Sandys's program, at
around 700.
It would have been an impressive record, except that in 1622, three years
later, the colony's population still totaled only about 700 people.
The figures are in the records; you can check the math. What it amounts
to is that in 1622, there are about 3,500 Virginians missing. No significant
number returned to England; most, after
The figures in the record all, could hardly afford passage over. No
make it clear: 3,500 significant number migrated to other col­
Virginians are missing. onies. We can account for the deaths of
347 colonists, slain in an Indian attack of
1622. But that leaves more than 3,000 settlers. There seems to be only one
way to do the accounting: those immigrants died.
Who-or what-was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Virginians?
The magnitude of the failure was so great that the leaders of the company
did not care to announce it openly. When the king got word of it, only after
the company had virtually bankrupted itself in 1624, he revoked its charter.
The historian who confronts the statistical outlines of this horror is forced
to ask a few questions. Just what conditions would produce a death rate in
the neighborhood of 75 to 80 percent? A figure that high is simply stag­
gering. For comparison, the death rate during the first (and worst) year at
the Pilgrims' Plymouth colony stayed a little below 50 percent, and during
the severe plague epidemics that swept Britain in the fourteenth century, the
death rate probably ranged from 20 to 45 or 50 percent.
Obvious answers suggest themselves. The colony could not sustain the
wave of new settlers, especially since Sandys, eager to increase Virginia's
population, sent so many people with little or no food to tide them over
until they could begin raising their own crops. Housing was inadequate.
The company in London repeatedly begged the colony's governors to build
temporary "guest houses" for the newcomers, while the governors in return
begged the company to send more provisions with recruits.
 Serving Time in Virginia 41

Disease took its toll. Colonists had discovered early on that Virginia was
an unhealthy place to live. For newcomers, the first summer proved so deadly
it was called the "seasoning time." Those who survived significantly raised
their chances of prospering. But dangers remained year-round, especially for
those weakened by the voyage or living on a poor diet. Contaminated wells
most likely contributed to outbreaks of typhoid fever, and malaria claimed
additional victims.
The obvious answers do much to explain the devastating death rate. Still,
even granting the seriousness of typhoid and other diseases, why a death rate
higher than the worst plague years? Why, after more than ten years, was the
Jamestown colony still not self-sufficient?
Self-sufficiency required that colonists raise their own food, primarily
corn. So the historian asks a simple question: how much work did it take to
grow corn? A look at the records confirms what might be suspected-that
no Virginian in those first years bothered to leave behind a treatise on agri­
culture. But a search of letters and company records provides bits of data
here and there. The Indians, Virginians discovered, spent only a few days a
year tending corn, and they often produced surpluses that they traded to the
Virginians. A minister in the colony reported that "in the idle hours of one
week," he and three other men planted enough corn to last for four months.
Other estimates suggested that forty-eight hours' work was enough to plant
enough corn for a year. Even allowing for exaggeration, it seems clear that
comparatively little effort was needed to grow corn.
Yet if a settler could easily grow corn, and corn was desperately needed
to survive, what possible sense is the historian to make of the document
we encountered earlier, Governor Argall's proclamation of 1618 requir­
ing "Every man to sett two acres corn (Except Tradesmen following their
trades)." That year is not the last time the law appears on the books. It was
reentered in the 1620s and periodically up through the 1650s.
It's a puzzle: a law requiring Virginians to plant corn? Everyone is starv­
ing, planting and reaping take only a few weeks . . . and the government has
to order settlers to do it?
Yet the conclusion seems clear: Virginians had to be forced to grow corn.
The reason becomes clearer if we reexamine Governor Argall's gloomy
description of Jamestown when he stepped off the boat in 1617. The church
is down, the palisades pulled apart, the bridge in pieces, the fresh water
spoiled. Everything in the description
indicates the colony is falling apart, Starving colonists have to be
except for one paradoxical feature­ forced to grow corn?
the "weeds" in the street. The stock­
ades and buildings may have deteriorated from neglect, but it was not neglect
that caused "the market-place and streets, and all other spare places" to be
"planted with Tobacco." Unlike corn, tobacco required a great deal of atten­
tion to cultivate. It did not spring up in the streets by accident.
What Governor Argall's evidence is telling us, once we strip away the
original dull narrative perspective, is that at the same time that settlers were
42 APTER THE FACT: TBE ART OP HisromCAL DETECTION

Vuginia's early planters

marketed their tobacco
to the Dutch as well as
the English. This painting
on an early-seventeenth­
century ceramic tile shows
a Dutch smoker attempting
the novel accomplishment
of blowing smoke through
his nose. The new habit of
smoking, at once popular and
faintly disreputable, led to a
demand for Virginia tobacco
in Europe that drove up
prices and sent enterprising
colonists scrambling for
laborers to help raise the
profitable crop.

willing to let the colony fall apart, they were energetically planting tobacco
in all the "spare places" they could find.
Settlers had discovered as early as 1613 that tobacco was marketable. Soon
shipments increased dramatically, from 2,500 pounds in 1616 to 18,839
pounds in 1617 and 49,518 pounds in 1618. Some English buyers used
tobacco as a medicine, but most purchased it simply for the pleasure of smok­
ing it. Sandys and many other gentlemen looked upon the "noxious weed" as
a vice and did everything to discourage its planting. But his protests, as well
as the corn laws, had little effect. Tobacco was in Virginia to stay.

VIRGINIA BOOM COUNTRY

The Virginia records are full of statistics like the tobacco export figures:
number of pounds shipped, price of the "better sort" of tobacco for the
year 1619, number of settlers arriving on the Bona Nova. These statistics are
the sort of box-score evidence, recorded by pedestrian clerks for pedestrian
reasons, day in, day out. Yet once the historian cross-examines the facts for
his or her own purposes, they flesh out an astonishing picture of Virginia.
Historian Edmund S. Morgan, in his own reconstruction of the situation,
aptly labeled Virginia "the first American boom country."
For Virginia was booming. The commodity in demand-tobacco-was
not as glamorous as gold or silver, but the social dynamics operated in simi­
lar fashion. The lure of making a fortune created an unstable society where
wealth changed hands quickly, where an unbalanced economy centered
on one get-rich-quick commodity, and where the value of human dignity
counted for little.
 Seroing Time in Virginia 43

The shape of this boom-country society becomes clearer if we ask the same
basic questions about tobacco that we asked about corn. How much tobacco
could one person grow in a year? Could Virginians get rich doing it?
High-quality Virginia tobacco sold for only 1 to 3 shillings during the
1620s. What that price range meant in terms of profits depended, naturally,
on how much tobacco a planter could grow in a year. As with corn, the esti­
mates in the records are few and far between. John Rolfe suggested 1,000
plants in one year. William Capps, another settler, estimated 2,000 and also
noted that three of his boys, whose labor he equated with one and a half
men, produced 3,000 plants. Fortunately, Capps also noted that 2,000 plants
made up about 500 "weight" (or pounds) of tobacco, which allows us to con­
vert numbers of plants into number of pounds.
By comparing these figures with other estimates, we can calculate roughly
how much money a planter might have received for a crop. The chart below
summarizes how many plants or pounds of tobacco one or more workers
might have harvested in a year. The numbers in parentheses calculate the
number of pounds harvested per worker and the income such a harvest
would yield if tobacco were selling at either 1 or 3 shillings a pound.

Tobacco Production and Income Estimates

One-Year Production
Income
Number of Number Number One Man
Workers of Plants of Lbs. Lbs./Yr. ls 3s

1 (Rolfe) 1,000 (250) £12 £37.5

1 (Capps) 2,000 500 (5 00) 25 75
3 boys (1Vi men) 3,000 (5 00) 25 75
4men 2,800 (700) 46.5 139.5
6-7men 3,000--4,000 (540) 27 81

Source: Based on data presented in Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 197 5).

These estimates indicate that the amount of tobacco one man could produce
ranged from 250 to 700 pounds a year, an understandable variation given
that some planters worked harder than others, that some years provided bet­
ter growing weather, and that, as time passed, Virginians developed ways
to turn out bigger crops. Even by John Rolfe's estimate, made fairly early
and therefore somewhat low, a man selling 250 pounds at 1 shilling a pound
would receive £12 sterling for the year. On the high side, the estimates show
a gross of £140 sterling, given good prices. Indeed, one letter tells of a settler
who made £200 sterling after the good harvest of 1619. Such windfalls were
rare, but considering that an average agricultural worker in England made
less than £3 a year, even the lower estimates look good.
44 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

They look even better for another reason-namely, because that income
was what a planter earned working alone. In a society where servants, ten­
ants, and apprentices were common, if Virginians could get other people to
work for them, they could profit spectacularly.
Back to the basic questions. How did an Englishman get others to work
for him? He hired them. He made an agreement, a bond indicating what he
would give in return for their service and for how long the agreement was
to run.The terms varied from servant to servant but fell into several general
classes. Most favorable, from the worker's point of view, was the position
of tenant. A landowner had fields that needed working; the tenant agreed
to work them, usually for a term of four to seven years. In return, the ten­
ant kept half of what he produced. From the landowner's point of view, a
servant served the purpose better, since he was paid only room and board,
plus his passage from England. In return he gave his master everything he
produced. Apprentices, usually called "Duty boys" in Virginia because the
ship Duty brought many of them over, made up another class of workers.
Apprentices served for seven years, then another seven as tenants. Again
the master's cost was only transportation over and maintenance once in
Virginia.
Little in the way of higher mathematics is required to discover that if it
cost a master about £10 to £12 sterling to bring over a servant, and if that
master obtained the labor of several such servants for seven years, or even
for two or three, he stood to make a tidy fortune. In the good harvest of
1619, one master with six servants managed a profit of £1,000 sterling. That
was unusual perhaps, but by no means impossible. And Sandys's headright
policies played into the hands of the fortune-makers: every servant imported
meant another fifty acres of land that could be used for tobacco.
The lure was too much to resist. Virginians began bending every resource
in the colony toward growing tobacco. The historian can now appreciate the
significance of Governor Argall's proclamation (page 36) that no hay should
be used to "sweat," or cure, tobacco:
Colonists began bending every colonists were diverting hay from
resource toward growing tobacco­ livestock that desperately needed
the boom in Virginia was on. it ("it robs the poor beasts of their
fodder"), thus upsetting Virginia's
economy. The scramble for profits extended even to the skilled workers whom
Sandys sent over to diversify the colony's exports. The ironmongers deserted
in short order, having "turned good honestTobaccoemongers"; and of similar
well-intentioned projects, the report came back to London that "nothinge is
done in anie of them but all is vanished into smoke (that is to say into Tobac­
coe)." The boom in Virginia was on.
Planters were not the only people trying to make a fortune. The settler
who raised tobacco had to get it to market in Europe somehow, had to buy
corn if he neglected to raise any himself, and wanted to buy as many of the
comforts of life as could be had. Other men stood ready to deal with such
planters, and they had a sharp eye to their own profit.
 Serving Time in Virginia 45

One such settler was Abraham Peirsey, the merchant running the Vir­
ginia Company's magazine, or store. And if we now return to the Virginia
assembly's order, quoted earlier, requiring Peirsey to accept 3 shillings per
pound for the "beste sort" of tobacco, we can begin to understand why the
assembly was upset enough to pass the regulation. Peirsey was charging exor­
bitant prices for his supplies. He collected his fees in tobacco because there
was virtually no currency in Virginia. Tobacco had become the economic
medium of exchange. If Peirsey counted a pound of the best sort of tobacco
as worth only 2 shillings instead of 3, that was as good as raising his prices by
50 percent. As it happened, Peirsey charged two or three times the prices set
by the investors in London. Beyond that, he never bothered to pay back the
company for its supplies that he sold. Sandys and the other investors never
saw a cent of the magazine's profits.
Another hunt through the records indicates what Peirsey was doing with
his ill-gotten gain: he plowed it back into the most attractive investment of
all, servants. We learn this not because Peirsey comes out and says so, but
because the census of 162 5 lists him as keeping thirty-nine servants, more
than anyone in the colony. At his death in 1628, he left behind "the best
Estate that was ever yett knowen in Virginia." When the company finally
broke the magazine's monopoly in 1620, other investors moved in. They
soon discovered that they could make more money selling alcohol than the
necessities of life. So the Virginia boom enriched the merchants of "rotten
Wynes" as well as the planters of tobacco, and settlers went hungry, in part,
because liquor fetched a better return than food.
Given these conditions in Virginia-given the basic social and economic
structures deduced from the historical record-put yourself in the place of
most tenants or servants. What would life be like? What were the chances
for success?
For servants, the prospect was bad indeed. First, they faced the fierce
mortality rate. Chances were that they would not survive the first season­
ing summer. Even if they did, their master was out to make a fortune by
their labor. Being poor to begin with, they were in no position to protect
themselves from abuse. In England the situation was different. Agricultural
workers usually offered their services once a year at hiring fairs. Since their
contracts lasted only a year, servants could switch to other employers if they
became dissatisfied. But going to Virginia required the expense of a long
voyage; masters would hire people only if they signed on for four to seven
years. Once in Virginia, what could servants do if they became disillusioned?
Go home? They had little enough money for the voyage over, even less to
get back.
Duty boys, the children, were least in a position to improve their lot. The
orphans Sandys hoped to favor by taking them off the London streets faced
a hard life in Virginia. They were additionally threatened by a law the Vir­
ginia planters put through the assembly, declaring that an apprentice who
committed a crime during his service had to begin his term all over again.
What constituted a crime, of course, was left up to the governor's council.
46 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

One Duty boy, Richard Hatch, appeared before the council because he had
commented, in a private house, on the recent execution of a settler for sod­
omy. Hatch had remarked "that in his consyence" he thought that the settler
was "put to death wrongfully." For this offense he was to be "whipt from
the forte to the gallows and from thence be whipt back againe, and be sett
uppon the Pillory and there to loose one of his eares." Although Hatch had
nearly completed his term of service-to Governor George Yeardly-he was
ordered to begin his term anew.
Tenants would seem to have been better off, but they too were subject
to the demand for labor. If immigrants could pay their passage over but
were unable to feed themselves upon arrival, they had little choice but to
hire themselves out as servants. And if their masters died before their terms
were up, there was virtually always another master ready to jump in and
claim them, legally or not. When George Sandys, Sir Edwin's brother, fin­
ished his term as colony treasurer, he dragged his tenants with him, even
though they had become freemen. "He maketh us serve him whether wee
will or noe," complained one, "and how to helpe it we doe not knowe for
hee beareth all the sway."
Even independent small planters faced the threat of servitude if their
crops failed or if Indian attacks made owning a small, isolated plantation too
dangerous. When William Capps, a small planter on the frontier, asked the
governor's council to outfit an expedition against hostile tribes in his neigh­
borhood, the council refused. Capps indignantly suggested what was going
through the minds of wealthy planters on the council. "Take away one of my
men to join the expedition," he imagines them saying,

there's 2000 Plantes gone, thates 500 waight of Tobacco, yea and what shall
this man doe, runne after the Indians? soft, I have perhaps 10, perhaps 15,
perhaps 20 men and am able to secure my owne Plantacion; how will they
doe that are fewer? let them :first be crusht alitle, and then perhaps they will
themselves make up the Nomber for their owne safetie. Theis I doubt are the
Cogitacions of some of our worthier men.

AND SLAVERY?
This reconstruction of Virginia society, from the Duty boy at the bottom
to the planters at the top, indicates that all along the line, labor had become
a valuable and desperately sought commodity. Settlers who were not in a
position to protect themselves found that the economy put constant pressure
on them. Planters bought, sold, and traded servants without their consent
and, on occasion, even used them as stakes in gambling games. There had
been "many complaints," acknowledged John Rolfe, "against the Governors,
Captaines, and Officers in Virginia: for buying and selling men and boies,"
something that "was held in England a thing most intolerable." One Eng­
lishman put the indignity quite succinctly: "My Master Atkins hath sold me
for £150 sterling like a damnd slave."
 Seruing Time in Virginia 47

"About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty
Negars." So wrote John Smith in 1619. The illustration is by Howard Pyle, a
nineteenth-century artist who prided himself on his research into costume and
,
setting. Yet even here, Pyle s depiction of the first African Americans probably
reflects illustrations he saw of the very different slave traffic of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. These early arrivals may have been sold as servants, not
slaves. Court records indicate that in the 1640s at least some black slaves had been
freed and were purchasing their own land.

Indeed, quite a few of the ingredients of slavery are found in Vrrginia: the
feverish boom that sparked the demand for human labor; the mortality rate
that encouraged survivors to become callous about human life; the servants
48 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

bought and sold, treated almost as if they were property. If we were looking
in the abstract to construct a society in which social and economic pressures
combined to encourage the development of human slavery, Virginia would
seem to fit the model neatly. Yet the actual records do not quite confirm the
hypothesis.
The earliest-known record of Africans in Virginia is a muster roll of
March 1619 (discovered only in the 1990s), which shows thirty-two Africans
(fifteen men and seventeen women) "in the service of sev[er]all planters." But
are these Africans working as ser­
Were the first Africans in Virginia vants or as slaves? The muster roll
servants or slaves? doesn't say. Historians have gone
through court records, invento­
ries, letters, wills, church documents-anything that might shed light on the
way blacks were treated. What little information that has surfaced indicates
that very few Africans came to Virginia in the colony's first half century.
People of African descent made up no more than 5 percent of the population
at any time during those years.
Furthermore, the status of those Africans who did come varied widely.
Before 1660 some were held as slaves for life, but others worked as servants.
Still others either were given their freedom or were able to purchase it. Even
the names in the record supply a clue to the mixed status of these early Afri­
can newcomers. In the eighteenth century, once slavery was well established,
planters tried to control the naming process, giving their slaves diminu­
tive names such as Jack or Sukey, or perhaps a classical Caesar or Hercules,
bestowed in jest. But during Virginia's early years, Africans tended to keep
their full names-names that often reflected the complex cultural landscape of
the African coast, where Europeans and Africans of many backgrounds mixed:
Bashaw Famando, John Graweere, Emanuel Driggus. Other Africans tried
to assimilate into English life. The man who first appeared in the colony's
records as only "Antonio a Negro" changed his name to Anthony Johnson.
"Francisco a Negroe" eventually became the freeman Frank Payne.
Only during the 1660s did the Virginia assembly begin to pass legislation
that separated blacks from whites, defining slavery, legally, as an institution.
Black Virginians, in other words, lived with white Virginians for more than
forty years before their status became fully and legally debased. The facts in
the records force us to turn the initial question around. If the 1620s, with its
boom economy, was such an appropriate time for slavery to have developed,
why didn't it?
Here, the talents of historians are stretched to their limits. They can
expect no obvious explanations from contemporaries such as John Rolfe,
Captain Smith, or William Capps. The development of slavery was some­
thing that came gradually to Virginia. Most settlers were not thinking or
writing about a change that developed over many decades. Even the records
left by the clerks are scant help. The best we can do is intelligent conjecture,
based on the kind of society that has been reconstructed.
 Serving Time in Virginia 49

Was it a matter of the simple availability of slaves? Perhaps. While Vir­

ginia was experiencing its boom of the 1620s, West Indian islands like Bar­
bados and St. Kitts were also being settled. There, where the cultivation of
sugar demanded even more intensive labor than tobacco did, the demand
for slaves was extremely high, and slavery developed more rapidly. If trad­
ers sailing from Africa could carry only so many slaves, and if the market
for them was better in Barbados than in Virginia, why sail all the way up
to Chesapeake Bay? Slave traders may not have found the effort worth it.
That is the conjecture of one historian, Richard Dunn. Other historians and
economists have argued that Chesapeake planters preferred white servants
but that during the 1670s the supply of servants from England began to
decrease, sending prices higher. At the same time, an economic depression
in the West Indies sent the price of slaves falling and sent slave dealers look­
ing to sell more slaves along the Chesapeake.
Edmund Morgan has suggested another possibility, based on the con­
tinuing mortality rate in Virginia. Put yourself in the place of the planter
searching for labor. You can buy either servants or slaves. Servants come
cheaper than slaves, of course, but you get to work them for only seven
years before they receive their freedom. Slaves are more expensive, but
you get their labor for the rest of their lives, as well as the labor of any
offspring. In the long run, the more expensive slave would have been the
better buy. But in Virginia in the 1620s? Everyone is dying anyway. What
are the chances that either servants or slaves are going to live for more than
seven, five, even three years? Wouldn't it make more sense to pay less and
buy servants on the assumption that whoever is bought may die shortly
anyway?
It is an ingenious conjecture, but it must remain that. No plantation
records have been found indicating that planters actually thought that
way. Available evidence does suggest that the high death rate in Virginia
began to drop only in the 1650s. It makes sense that only then, when
slaves became a profitable commodity, would laws come to be passed for­
mally establishing their legal status. Whatever the reasons may have been,
Virginia remained until the 1680s and 1690s what historian Ira Berlin has
termed a "society with slaves" rather than a full-fledged "slave society"
whose economy and culture revolved around the institution of slavery
based on race. During the boom of the 1620s, slavery did not flourish
markedly.
Sometime between 1629 and 1630 the economic bubble popped. The
price of tobacco plummeted from 3 shillings to a penny a pound. Virgin­
ians tried desperately to prop it up again, either by limiting production or
by simple edict, but they did not succeed. Planters still could make money,
but the chance for a quick fortune had vanished-"into smoke," as Sandys or
one of his disillusioned investors would no doubt have remarked. It is much
to the credit of historians that the feverish world of the Chesapeake has not,
like its cash crop, entirely vanished in similar fashion.
50 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

The vigorous prose of Captain John Smith struts, bounces, jars, and jounces
from one page to the next. A sampling of his writings are gathered in Karen
Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings
(Chapel Hill, 1988). Frederick Fausz perceptively discusses white-Native
American relations in early Virginia in William W. Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in
Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institu­
tions, A.D. 1000-1800 (Washington, DC, 1985), pp. 225-268. Edmund S.
Morgan brilliantly reconstructs boom-country Virginia in American Slavery,
American Freedom (New York, 197 5). Much of the new scholarship on the
development of slavery in Virginia (and elsewhere in North America) can
be found in the judicious synthesis of Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The
First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), and
Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development ofSouthern Cultures in the
Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986). Anthony Parent Jr. argues
that the planter class knew exactly what it was doing in establishing the insti­
tution of slavery in late-seventeenth-century Virginia in Foul Means: The
Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
PAST AND PRESENT

Is Slavery Dead?

The slave named Enung was desperate and starving. Outside, she saw a
stranger near the bushes. Neither of her masters was anywhere in sight. So she
ran out, wearing only the ragged clothes that had been given her. Having been
brought from a continent halfway across the world, she knew only a few words
of English. As she ran up, the man caught sight of her, astonished at how ema­
ciated she seemed. Then she said the word that had been on her mind:
"Doughnut." And repeated it: "Doughnut."
The man, a landscape gardener, went to his truck and gave her the half­
dozen doughnuts he happened to have in the cab.
This is not an account like the fictional baseball game narrated by Captain
John Smith. The event actually occurred in a pleasant suburb on Long Island,
New Yark. Enung was Indonesian, brought to the United States by two natu­
ralized Indian citizens, who were tried in 2007 for hiring her and another
woman under conditions of virtual slavery. The two "servants" were forced to
sleep in closets, beaten with rolling pins and brooms, given little to eat, and
for five years never allowed out of the house except to take out the garbage.
Slavery was officially outlawed by the Slavery Convention of 1926, spon­
sored by the League of Nations. Yet human rights organizations estimate
that today some 27 million people are enslaved, which is to say, forced to
labor without pay under the threat of violence. The CIA estimates that
anywhere from 14,500 to 16,000 people are brought to the United States
annually under such conditions. The most common type of slavery, account­
ing for well over half of all slaves, is debt bondage. Sex slavery constitutes
another widespread abuse; a third category is forced labor, in which the
promise of good jobs and wages lures people into isolated areas, such as min­
ing compounds, where they cannot escape the harsh work set before them.
But pleasant suburbs can be isolated, too, as Enung discovered when she was
brought to the United States.
What factors allow slavery to persist to such a great degree, even when it
has been outlawed internationally? How do those factors compare with the
forces encouraging the growth of slavery in the seventeenth century?

51
CHAPTER 3

The Visible and Invisible

Worlds of Salem

What sparked the witchcraft hysteria of 1692? Historians studying

the psychological and social contexts of this tragic incident have
turned up unexpected answers.

If historians are in the business of reconstruction, it follows that they must

make some of the same kinds of decisions as architects or builders. Before
they begin their work, they must decide on the scale of their projects. How
much ground should be covered? A year? Fifty years? Several centuries?
How will the subject matter be defined or limited? The story of slavery's
arrival in Virginia might be ranked as a moderately large topic. It spans some
sixty years and involves thousands of immigrants and an entire colony. Fur­
thermore, the topic is large because of its content and themes. The rise of
slavery surely ranks as a central strand of the American experience. To grasp
it well requires more breadth of vision than, for instance, understanding the
history of American hats during the same period. The lure of topics both
broad and significant is undeniable, and there have always been historians
willing to pull on their seven-league boots.
The great equalizer of such grand plans is the twenty-four-hour day. His­
torians have only a limited amount of time, and the more years covered, the
less time available to research the events in each year. Conversely, the nar­
rower the area of research, the more the historian can become immersed in
a period's details. A keen mind working on an apparently small topic may
uncover relationships and connections whose significance goes beyond the
subject matter's original boundaries.
Salem Village in 1692 is such a microcosm-one familiar to most students
of American history. That was the place and the time witchcraft came to
New England with a vengeance, dominating the life of the village for ten
months. Because the witchcraft episode exhibited well-defined boundaries in
both time and space, it shows well how an oft-told story may be transformed
by the intensive research of small-scale history. Traditionally, the outbreak
at Salem has been viewed as an incident separate from the events of everyday
village life. Even to label the witchcraft episode as an "outbreak" suggests

52
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 53

that it is best viewed as an epidemic, alien to the community's normal func­

tions. The "germs" of bewitchment break out suddenly and inexplicably­
agents, presumably, of some invading disease.
Over the past decades, however, historians have studied the traumatic
experiences of 1692 in great detail. In so doing they have created a more
sophisticated model of the mental world behind the Salem outbreak. They
have also suggested ways in which the witchcraft episode was tied to the
everyday events of village life.The techniques of small-scale history, in other
words, have provided a compelling psychological and social context for the
events of 1692.

BEWITCHMENT AT SALEM VILLAGE

The baffling troubles experienced in Salem Village began during the winter
of 1691-1692 in the home of the village's minister, Samuel Parris.There,
Parris's nine-year-old daughter Betty and his niece Abigail Williams had
taken strangely ill, claiming that they had been "bitten and pinched by invis­
ible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and
returned back again ...beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural
Disease to effect." Later traditions-not necessarily reliable-suggested that
the afflictions came after a group of girls met to divine what sort of men
their future husbands might be, a subject of natural enough interest.Lacking
a crystal ball, they used the next available substitute, the white of a raw egg
suspended in a glass of water. At some point during these conjurings, things
went sour.One of the girls thought she detected "a specter in the likeness of
a coffin" in the glass-a threatening omen.Betty, the youngest of the girls,
began complaining of pinching, prickling sensations, knifelike pains, and the
feeling that she was being choked. In the weeks that followed, three more
girls exhibited similar symptoms.
Whatever the cause of the young girls' symptoms, the Reverend Parris
was baffled by them, as were several doctors and ministers he brought in
to observe the strange behaviors.When one doctor hinted at the possibil­
ity of witchcraft, a neighbor, Mary Sibley, suggested putting to use a bit
of New England folklore to reveal whether there had been any sorcery.
Sibley persuaded two slaves living in the Parris household, John Indian and
his wife, Tituba, to bake a "witch cake" made of rye meal and urine given
them by the girls. The cake was fed to a dog-the theory of bewitchment
confirmed, presumably, if the dog suffered torments similar to those of the
afflicted girls.
This experiment seems to have frightened the girls even more, for their
symptoms worsened. Thoroughly alarmed, adults pressed the girls for the
identity of the specters they believed were tormenting them.When the girls
named three women, a formal complaint was issued, and on February 29 the
suspects were arrested. That was the obvious action to take, for seventeenth­
century New Englanders conceived of witchcraft as a crime.If the girls were
being tormented, it was necessary to punish those responsible.
54 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Two of the women arrested, Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne, were
already unpopular in the village. The third accused was Parris's Indian slave,
Tituba. Tituba may have been purchased by Parris during a visit to the
Caribbean and was perhaps originally from South America, Florida, or the
Georgia Sea Islands. When questioned by village magistrates, Sarah Good
angrily denied the accusations, suggesting instead that Sarah Osbourne
was guilty. Osbourne denied the charges, but the dynamics of the hearings
changed abruptly when Tituba confessed to being a witch. One account of
the trials, published eight years later, reported that her admission came after
an angry Reverend Parris had beaten Tituba. For whatever reason, she testi­
fied that four women and a man were causing the afflictions of the young
women. Good and Osbourne were among them. "They hurt the children,"
Tituba reported. "And they lay all upon me and they tell me ifI will not hurt
the children, they will hurt me." The tale continued, complete with appari­
tions of black and red rats, a yellow dog with a head like a woman, "a thing
all over hairy, all the face hairy," and midnight rides to witches' meetings
where plans were being laid to attack Salem.
During New England's first seventy years, few witchcraft cases had come
before the courts. Those that had were dispatched quickly, and calm soon
returned. Salem proved differ­
ent. In the first place, Tituba had During New England'sfirst seventy
described several other witches years, the few witchcraft cases that
and a wizard, though she said she surfaced were dispatched quickly.
was unable to identify them. The Salem proved different.
villagers felt they could not rest
so long as these agents remained at large. Furthermore, the young women
continued to name names-and now not just community outcasts, but a
wide variety of villagers, some respectable church members. The new sus­
pects joined Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne in jail. By the end
of April, the hunt even led to a former minister, George Burroughs, then
living in Maine.
If the accused refused to admit guilt, the magistrates looked for corrobo­
rating proof. Physical evidence, such as voodoo dolls and pins found among
the suspect's possessions, were considered incriminating. Furthermore, if
the devil made a pact with someone, he supposedly required a physical mark
of allegiance and thus created a "witch's tit" where either he or his familiar, a
likeness in animal form, might suck. Prisoners in the Salem trials were often
examined for any abnormal marks on their bodies.
Aside from physical signs, the magistrates considered evidence that
a witch's ill will might have caused a victim to suffer. This kind of black
magic-harm by occult means-was known as maleficium. Villager Sarah
Gadge, for example, testified that she had once refused Sarah Good lodging
for the night. According to Gadge, Good "fell to muttering and scolding
extreamly and so told said Gadge if she would not let her in she should give
her something . . . and the next morning after . . . one of the said Gadges
Cowes Died in a Sudden terrible and Strange unusuall maner."
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 55

The magistrates also considered what they called "spectral evidence"­

ghostly likenesses of the witches that victims reported seeing during their
torments. In an attempt to confirm that these specters were really links to
the accused witches, the magistrates kept the afflicted women in the court­
room and observed them while the accused were being examined. "Why doe
you hurt these children?" one of the magistrates asked Sarah Osbourne, in
a typical examination. "I doe not hurt them," replied Osbourne. The record
continues: "The children abovenamed being all personally present accused
her face to face which being don, they ware all hurt, afflicted and tortured
very much: which being over and thay out of theire fitts thay sayd that said
Sarah Osburne did then Come to them and hurt them."
The problem with spectral evidence was that it could not be corroborated
by others. Only the victim saw the shape of the tormentor. Such testimony
was normally controversial, for theologians in Europe as well as in New
England believed that spectral evidence should be treated with caution. After
all, what better way for the devil to spread confusion than by assuming the
shape of an innocent person? In Salem, however, the magistrates considered
spectral testimony as paramount. When they handed down indictments,
almost all the charges referred only to the spectral torments exhibited by
accusers during the pretrial hearings.
OnJune 2 a court especially established to deal with the witchcraft out­
break heard its first case, that of a woman named Bridget Bishop. Even
before the Salem controversy, Bishop had been suspected of witchcraft
by a number of villagers. She was quickly convicted and, eight days later,
hanged from a scaffold on a nearby rise. The site came to be known as
Witch's Hill-with good reason, since onJune 29 the court again met and
convicted five more women. One of them, Rebecca Nurse, had been found
innocent, but the court's chief justice disapproved the verdict and con­
vinced the jurors to change their minds. OnJuly 19 Nurse joined the other
four women on the scaffold, staunch churchwoman that she was, praying
for the judges' souls as well as her own. Sarah Good remained defiant to
the end. "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard," she told the attend­
ing minister, "and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to
drink."
Still the accusations continued; still the court sat. As the net was cast
wider, more and more accused were forced to work out their response to
the crisis. A few, most of them wealthy, went into hiding until the furor
subsided. Giles Cory, a farmer whose wife, Martha, was executed as a witch,
refused to submit to a trial by jury. The traditional penalty for such a refusal
was the peine fort et dure, in which the victim was placed between two boards
and had heavy stones placed on him until he agreed to plead innocent or
guilty. Although that punishment had been outlawed in Massachusetts, the
court nonetheless carried it out. Cory was slowly crushed to death, stubborn
to the end. His last words were said to be, "More weight."
Some of the accused admitted guilt, the most satisfactory solution for the
magistrates. Puritans could be a remarkably forgiving people. They were not
56 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

interested in punishment for its own sake. If a lawbreaker gave evidence of

sincere regret for his or her misdeeds, Puritan courts would often reduce or
suspend the sentence. So it was in the witchcraft trials at Salem (unlike most
trials in Europe, where confessing witches were executed). But the policy of
forgiveness had unforeseen consequences. Those who were wrongly accused
quickly realized that if they did not confess, they were likely to be hanged. If
they did admit guilt, they could escape death but would have to demonstrate
their sincerity by providing details of their misdeeds and names of other par­
ticipants. The temptation must have been great to confess and, in so doing,
to implicate other innocent people.
Given such pressures, the web of accusations continued to spread. August
produced six more trials and five hangings. Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of a
tavern keeper, received a reprieve because she was pregnant, the court being
unwilling to sacrifice the life of an innocent child. Her husband, John, was
not spared. September saw another eight victims hanged. More than a hun­
dred suspected witches remained in jail.
Pressure to stop the trials had been building, however. One member of
the court, Nathaniel Saltonstall, resigned in protest after the first execution.
More important, the ministers of the province were becoming uneasy. In
public they had supported the trials, but privately they wrote letters cau­
tioning the magistrates. Finally, in early October, Increase Mather, one of
the most respected preachers in the colony, published a sermon signed by
fourteen other pastors that strongly condemned the use of spectral evidence.
Mather argued that to convict on the basis of a specter, which everyone
agreed was the devil's creation, in effect took Satan at his own word. That,
in Mather's view, risked disaster. "It were better that ten suspected witches
should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned," he
concluded.
Mather's sermon convinced the colony's governor, William Phips, that the
trials had gone too far. He forbade any more arrests and dismissed the court.
The following January a new court met to dispose of the remaining cases, but
this time almost all the defendants were acquitted. Phips immediately granted
a reprieve to the three women who were convicted and in April released the
remaining prisoners. Satan's controversy with Salem was finished.
That, in outline, is the witchcraft story as it has come down to us for so
many years. Rightly or wrongly, the story has become an indelible part of
American history. The startling fits of possession, the drama of the court
examinations, the eloquent pleas of the innocent condemned-all make for
a superb drama that casts into shadow the rest of Salem's more pedestrian
history.
Indeed, the episode is unrepresentative. Witchcraft epidemics were not a
serious problem in New England and were even less of a problem in other
American colonies. Such persecutions were much more common in Europe,
where they reached frightening proportions. The death of 20 people at
Salem is sobering, but the magnitude of the event diminishes considerably
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 57

alongside the estimate of 40,000 to 60,000 people executed for witchcraft in

early modern Europe.
Now, a curious thing has resulted from this illumination of a single, iso­
lated episode. Again and again the story of Salem Village has been told, quite
naturally, as a drama complete unto itself. The everyday history that pre­
ceded and followed the trials-the petty town bickerings, arguments over
land and ministers-was for many years largely passed over. Yet the dis­
turbances at Salem did not occur in a vacuum. They may indeed have con­
stituted an epidemic, but not the sort caused by some germ pool brought
into the village over the rutted roads from Boston. So the historian's first
task is to take the major strands of the witchcraft affair and see how they
are woven into the larger fabric of New England society. Salem Village was
small enough that virtually every one of its residents can be identified. We
can find out who owned what land, the amount of taxes each resident paid,
what sermons people listened to on Sundays. In so doing, a richer, far more
intriguing picture of New England life begins to emerge.

THE INVISIBLE SALEM

Paradoxically, the most obvious facet of Salem life that the historian must
recreate is also the most insubstantial: what ministers of the period would
have called the "invisible world." Demons, familiars, witchcraft, and magic
all shaped seventeenth-century New England. For most Salem Villagers,
Satan was a living, supernatural being who might appear to people, bargain
with them, even enter into agreements. The men and women who submit­
ted to such devilish compacts were said to exchange their souls in return for
special powers or favors: money and good fortune, perhaps, or the ability to
revenge themselves on others.
Most often, ordinary folk viewed witchcraft as a simple matter of male­
ficium: Sarah Gadge, for example, believing that Sarah Good caused one of
her cows to die after a hostile encounter. The process by which such suspi­
cions grew was described well in 1587 by George Gifford, an English minis­
ter who was himself quite skeptical of witchcraft:

Some woman doth fall out bitterly with her neighbour: there followeth some
great hurt ...There is a suspicion conceived.Within few years after, [the same
woman] is in some jar [argument] with another. He is also plagued. This is
noted of all. Great fame is spread of the matter. Mother W is a witch. She had
bewitched Goodman B. Two hogs died strangely: or else he is taken lame.

Well, Mother W doth begin to be very odious and terrible unto many.
Her neighbours dare say nothing but yet in their hearts they wish she were
hanged. Shortly after, another [person] falleth sick and doth pine; he can have
no stomach unto his meat, nor he cannot sleep. The neighbours come to visit
58 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

him. "Well neighbour," sayeth one, "do ye not suspect some naughty dealing:
did ye never anger Mother W?" "Truly neighbour (sayeth he) I have not liked
the woman a long time."

Such suspicions of witchcraft were widespread in the early modern world.

Indeed, the belief in maleficium was only one part of a worldview filled with
magic and wonders-magic that
could be manipulated by some­ The beliefin witchcraft was only one
one with the proper knowledge.
part of a worldview filled with magic
Fortune-tellers provided a win­
dow into the future; objects like
and wonders-magic that could be
horseshoes brought good luck; manipulated by someone with the
earthquakes and comets warned proper knowledge.
of God's judgments. People who
possessed more than the usual store of supernatural knowledge were known
as "cunning folk" who might be called upon in times of trouble to heal the
illness of a sick villager, cast horoscopes for a merchant worried about a ship's
upcoming voyage, or discover what sort of children a woman might bear.
The outlines of such beliefs are easily enough sketched, but it can be dif­
ficult to imagine how a Salem Villager who believed in such wonders might
have behaved. People who hold beliefs foreign to our own do not always act
the way that we think they should. Over the years, historians of the witchcraft
controversy have faced the challenge of re-creating Salem's mental world.
One of the first people to review Salem's troubles was Thomas Hutchin­
son, who in 1750 published a history of New England's early days. Hutchin­
son did not believe in witchcraft; fewer and fewer educated people did as
the eighteenth century progressed. Therefore he faced an obvious question,
which centered on the motivations of the accusers. If the devil never actually
covenanted with anyone, how were the accusers' actions to be explained?
Some of Hutchinson's contemporaries argued that the bewitched were suf­
fering from "bodily disorders which affected their imaginations." He dis­
agreed: "A little attention must force conviction that the whole was a scene
of fraud and imposture, begun by young girls, who at first perhaps thought
of nothing more than being pitied and indulged, and continued by adult per­
sons who were afraid of being accused themselves." Charles Upham, a min­
ister who published a two-volume study of the episode in 1867, was equally
hard on the young women. "There has seldom been better acting in a the­
atre than displayed in the presence of the astonished and horror-stricken
rulers," he concluded tartly.
Indeed, the historical record does supply some evidence that the possessed
may have been shamming. When Elizabeth Proctor was accused of being a
witch, a friend of hers testified that he had seen one of the afflicted women
cry out, "There's Goody Procter!"* But when people in the room challenged

*Goody was short for Goodwife, a term used for most married women. Husbands were addressed as
Goodman. The terms Mr. and Mrs. were reserved for those of higher social standing.
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 59

the woman's claim as evidently false, she backed off, saying only that "she
did it for sport; they must have some sport."
Another of the tormented young women, Mary Warren, stopped having
fits and began to claim "that the afflicted persons did but dissemble"-that
is, that they were only pretending. But then the other accusers began to
declare that Mary's specter was afflicting them. Placed on the witness stand,
Mary again fell into a fit "that she did neither see nor hear nor speak." The
examination record continued:

Afterwards she started up, and said I will speak and cryed out, Oh! I am sorry
for it, I am sorry for it, and wringed her hands, and fell a little while into a fit
again and then came to speak, but immediately her teeth were set, and then she
fell into a violent :fit and cryed out, oh Lord help me! Oh Good Lord Save me!
And then afterward cryed again, I will tell I will tell and then fell into a dead
fit againe.
And afterwards cryed I will tell, they did, they did they did and then fell
into a violent fit again.
After a little recovery she cryed I will tell they brought me to it and then fell
into a :fit again which :fits continueing she was ordered to be had out.

The scene is tantalizing. It appears as if Mary Warren is about to confess

when pressure from the other girls forces her back to her former role as
one of the afflicted. In the following weeks, the magistrates questioned Mary
repeatedly, with the result that her fits returned and she again joined in the
accusations. Such evidence suggests that the girls may well have been acting.
Yet such a theory leaves certain points unexplained. If the girls were only
acting, what are we to make of the many other witnesses who testified to
deviltry? One villager, Richard Comans, reported seeing Bridget Bishop's
specter in his bedroom. Bishop lay upon his breast, he reported, and "so
oppressed" him that "he could not
Were some of the "ajjlicted" girls speak nor stur, noe not so much as
merely willful adolescents having fun to awake his wife" sleeping next to
at the expense of their elders? him. Comans and others who tes­
tified were not close friends of the
girls; there appears no reason why they might be conspiring with each other.
How does the historian explain their actions?
Even some of the afflicted women's behavior is difficult to explain as con­
scious fraud. It is easy enough to imagine faking certain fits: whirling through
the room crying "whish, whish"; being struck dumb. Yet other behavior was
truly sobering: being pinched, pummeled, nearly choked to death; contor­
tions so violent several grown men were required to restrain the victims.
Even innocent victims of the accusations were astounded by such behavior.
Rebecca Nurse on the witness stand could only look in astonishment at the
"lamentable fits" she was accused of causing. "Do you think these [afflicted]
suffer voluntary or involuntary?" asked one examiner. "I cannot tell what to
think of it," replied Nurse hesitantly. The prosecutor pressed others with
60 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

similar results. What ails the girls, if not your torments? "I do not know."
Do you think they are bewitched? "I cannot tell." What do you think does
ail them? "There is more than ordinary."
"More than ordinary"-historians may accept that possibility without
necessarily supposing the presence of the supernatural. Psychiatric research
has long established what we now take almost for granted: that people may
act for reasons they themselves do
not fully understand; even more, Conversion hysteria suggests that
that emotional problems may be emotional problems may be the
the unconscious cause of appar­ unconscious cause of apparently
ently physical disorders. The ratio­ physical disorders.
nalistic psychologies of Thomas
Hutchinson and Charles Upham led them to reject any middle ground.
Either the Salem women had been tormented by witches, or they were fak­
ing their fits. But given a fervent belief in devils and witches, the Salem epi­
sode can be understood not as a game of fraud gone out of control, but as a
study in abnormal psychology on a community-wide scale.
Scholars of the twentieth century have been more inclined to adopt
this medical model. Indeed, one of the first to make the suggestion was a
pediatrician, Ernest Caulfield. The accused "were not impostors or pests
or frauds," he wrote in 1943; "they were not cold-blooded malignant brats.
They were sick children in the worst sort of mental distress-living in fear
for their very lives and the welfare of their immortal souls." Certainly, the
fear that gripped susceptible subjects must have been extraordinary. They
imagined themselves pursued by agents of the devil, intent on torment or
even murder, and locked doors provided no protection. Anthropologists
who have examined witchcraft in other cultures note that bewitchment can
be traumatic enough to lead to death. An Australian aborigine who discovers
himself bewitched will

stand aghast....His cheeks blanch and his eyes become glassy ....He attempts
to shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat, and all that one might see
is froth at his mouth.His body begins to tremble and the muscles twist invol­
untarily. He sways backwards and falls to the ground, and after a short time
appears to be in a swoon; but soon after he writhes as if in mortal agony.

Afterward such victims often refuse to eat, lose all interest in life, and die.
Although there is no record of bewitchment death in Salem, the anthropo­
logical studies indicate the remarkable depth of reaction possible in a com­
munity that believes in its own magic.*
Historian Chadwick Hansen compared the behavior of the bewitched with
the neurotic syndrome that psychiatrists refer to as "conversion hysteria."

*A least one bewitchment death may have occurred, however. Daniel Wilkins believed that John
Willard was a witch and meant him no good. Wilkins sickened, and some of the afflicted girls were
summoned to his bedside, where they claimed that they saw Willard's specter afflicting him. The
doctor would not touch the case, claiming it "preternatural." Shortly after, Wilkins died.
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 61

A neurosis is a disorder of behavior that functions to avoid or deflect intoler­

able anxiety. Normally, an anxious person deals with an emotion through
conscious action or thought. If the ordinary means of coping fail, however,
the unconscious takes over. Hysterical patients convert their mental worries
into physical symptoms such as blindness, paralysis of various parts of the
body, choking, fainting, or attacks of pain. These symptoms, it should be
stressed, cannot be traced to organic causes. There is nothing wrong with
the nervous system during an attack of paralysis, or with the optic nerve in a
case of blindness. Physical disabilities are mentally induced. Such hysterical
attacks often occur in patterns that bear striking resemblance to some of the
Salem afflictions.
Pierre Janet, the French physician who wrote the classic Major Symptoms
of Hysteria (1907), reported that a characteristic hysterical fit begins with a
pain or strange sensation in some part of the body, often the lower abdomen.
From there, it

seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it often spreads to
the epigastrium [the region lying over the stomach], to the breasts, then to the
throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for a very long
time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patient has the sensa­
tion of too big an object as it were, a ball rising in her throat and choking her.
Most of us have probably experienced a mild form of the last symptom-
a proverbial "lump in the throat" that comes in times of stress. The hys­
teric's lump, or globus hystericus, is more extreme, as are the accompanying
convulsions: "the head is agitated in one direction or another, the eyes
closed, or open with an expression of terror, the mouth distorted."
Compare those symptoms with the fits of another tormented accuser,
Elizabeth Brown:

When [the witch's specter] did come it was as birds pecking her legs or prick­
ing her with the motion of thayr wings and then it would rize up into her
stamak with pricking pain as nayls and pins of which she did bitterly complayn
and cry out like a women in travail and after that it would rise to her throat in
a bunch like a pullets egg and then she would tern back her head and say witch
you shant choak me.
The diagnosis of hysteria has gained ground over the past decades. Yet the
issue of fraud cannot be put so easily to rest. Bernard Rosenthal, a scholar
who has reexamined the Salem records, argues that fraud and hysteria were
intermingled. What are we to make, for example, of testimony about the
"torments" of one Susannah Sheldon?

Susannah Sheldon being at the house of William Shaw she was tied her hands
a cross in such a manner we were forced to cut the string before we could git
her hand loose and when shee was out of her fit she told us it [was] Goody
Dustin that did tye her hands after that manner, and 4 times shee hath been
tyed in this manner in [two] weeks time[.] The 2 first times shee sayth it was
Goody Dustin and the 2 last times it was Sarah Goode that did tye her.
62 AFTER TBE FACT: THE ART OF Hl:STOBICAL DETECTION

A hysterical convulsive attack of one of the patients in Salpetriere Hospital

during the nineteenth century. J. M. Charcot, the physician in charge of the clinic,
spent much of his time studying the disorder. Note the crossed legs, similar to
some of the Salem girls' fits.

It is one matter to have "fits" through terror but another to have wrists
tied four times by a specter. Unless we believe in invisible spirits, the only
reasonable explanation would seem to be that Susannah Sheldon had a
confederate who tied her hands. Similarly Deodat Lawson, a minister who
devoutly believed in witchcraft, reported in March 1692 that

some of the afflicted, as they were striving in their fits in open court, have (by
invisible means) had their wrists bound fast together with a real cord, so as

it could hardly be taken off without cutting. Some afflicted have been found
with their arms tied, and hanged upon an hook, from whence others have been
forced to take them down, that they might not expire in that posture.

The conclusion, argued Rosenthal, must be similar: "Whether the 'afflicted'

worked these shows out among themselves or had help from others cannot
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Salem 63

be determined; but there is little doubt that such calculated action was delib­
erately conceived to perpetuate the fraud in which the afflicted were involved,
and that theories of hysteria or hallucination cannot account for people being
bound, whether on the courtroom floor or on hooks." Such evidence sug­
gests a complex set of behaviors in which both hysteria and fraud played
a part.
As for those who were accused of witchcraft, they were put under severe
pressure by the court's decision to view confession as worthy of pardon while
viewing denials of witchcraft as a sign of guilt. Indeed, the court magistrates
appeared not to want to take no for an answer. John Proctor complained
that when his son was examined, "because he would not confess that he was
Guilty, when he was Innocent, they tyed him Neek and Heels till the Blood
gushed out at his Nose, and would have kept him so 24 Hours, if one more
Merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him."
Sarah Churchill, a young woman of about seventeen, experienced similar
pressures. She apparently succumbed to her fears and testified that she was
a witch. Soon, however, she had second thoughts, for she came crying and
wringing her hands to an older friend, Sarah Ingersoll. "I asked her what she
ailed?" reported Ingersoll.

She answered she had undone herself. I asked her in what. She said in belying
herself and others in saying she had set her hand to the devil's Book whereas she
said she never did. I told her I believed she had set her hand to the book. She
answered crying and said no no no, I naver, I naver did. I asked then what had
made her say she did. She answered because they threatened her and told her
they would put her into the dungeon and put her along with Mr. Burroughs,
and thus several times she followed [me] on up and down telling me that she
had undone herself in belying herself and others. I asked her why she didn't tell
the truth now. She told me because she had stood out so long in it that now she
darst not. She said also that if she told Mr. Noyes [an investigating minister]
but once that she had set her hand to the Book he would believe her, but if she
told the truth and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times he
would not believe her.

Thus psychological terrors sprang from more than one source. The
frights of the invisible world, to be sure, led many villagers to fear for their
lives and souls. But when the magistrates refused to accept the protests of
innocence, they created equally terrifying pressures to lie in order to escape
execution. As the witchcraft episodes spread to include hundreds of people
in the community, it is not surprising that different individuals behaved in a
wide variety of ways.

THE VISIBLE SALEM

It would be tempting, having explored the psychological dynamics of Salem,
to suppose that the causes of the outbreak have been fairly well explained.
There is the satisfaction of placing the symptoms of the modern hysteric side
64 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

by side with those of the seventeenth-century bewitched and seeing them

match, or of carefully reading the trial records to distinguish likely cases of
fraud from those of hysteria. Yet by narrowing our inquiry to the motiva­
tions of the possessed, we have left other important facets of the Salem epi­
sode unexplored.
In the first place, the investigation thus far has dealt with the controversy
on an individual rather than a social level. But step back for a moment. For
whatever reasons, approximately
150 people in Salem and other What ifwe view the witchcraft
towns found themselves accused. outbreak from within a social context
Why were those particular people rather than an individual one?
singled out? Does any common
bond explain why they, and not others, were accused? Only after we have
examined their social identities can we answer that question.
Another indication that the social context of Salem Village needs to be exam­
ined is the nature of hysteria itself. Hysterics are notably suggestible-that
is, sensitive to the influence of their environment. Scattered testimony in the
records suggests that sometimes when the young women saw specters whom
they could not identify, adults suggested names. "Was it Goody Cloyse? Was
it Rebecca Nurse?" If true, such conditions confirm the need to move beyond
strictly personal motivations to the social setting of the community.
In doing so, a logical first step would be to look for correlations, or char­
acteristics common to groups that might explain their behavior. Are the
accusers all church members and the accused nonchurch members? Are
the accusers wealthy and respectable and the accused poor and disreputa­
ble? The historian assembles the data, shuffles them around, and looks for
matchups.
Take the two social characteristics just mentioned, church membership
and wealth. Historians can compile lists from the trial records of both the
accusers and the accused. With those lists in hand, they can begin checking
the church records to discover which people on each list were church mem­
bers. Or they can search tax records to see whose tax rates were highest and
thus which villagers were wealthiest. Land transactions were recorded, indi­
cating which villagers owned the most land. Inventories of personal property
were made when a member of the community died, so at least historians
have some record of an individual's assets at death, if not in 1692. Other
records may mention a trade or occupation, which will give a clue to relative
wealth or social status.
If you made such calculations for the Salem region, you would quickly
find yourself at a dead end, a spot all too familiar to practicing historians.
True, the first few accused witches were not church members, but soon
enough the faithful found themselves in jail along with nonchurch mem­
bers. A similar situation holds for wealth. Although Tituba, Sarah Good, and
Sarah Osbourne were relatively poor, merchants and wealthy farmers were
accused as the epidemic spread. The correlations fail to check.
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 65

This dead end was roughly the point that had been reached when two
historians, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, were inspired to take liter­
ally the advice about going back to the drawing board. More than a hun­
dred years earlier, Charles Upham had made a detailed map of Salem for
his own study of the witchcraft episode. Upham examined the old town
records, paced the actual sites of old houses, and established to the best of his
knowledge the residences of a large majority of Salem Villagers. Boyer and
Nissenbaum took their list of accusers and accused and noted the location of
each village resident. The results were striking, as can be seen from the map
on page 66.
Of the fourteen accused witches in the village, twelve lived in the eastern
section. Of the thirty-two adult villagers who testified against the accused,
thirty lived in the western section. "In other words," concluded Boyer and
Nissenbaum, "the alleged witches and those who accused them resided on
opposite sides of the Village." Furthermore, of twenty-nine residents who
publicly defended the accused in some way, twenty-four lived in the east­
ern half of the village. Often they were close neighbors of the accused. It is
moments like these that make the historian want to behave, were it not for
the staid air of research libraries, like Archimedes leaping from his fabled
bathtub and shouting "Eureka!"
The discovery is only the beginning of the task. The geographic chart
suggests a division, but it does not indicate what that division is, other than
a general east-west split. So Boyer and Nissenbaum began to explore the
history of the village itself, expanding their microcosm of 1692 backward in
time. They investigated a social situation that historians had long recognized
but never associated with the Salem witch trials: Salem Village's uneasy rela­
tion to its social parent, Salem Town.
Salem Town's settlement followed the pattern of most coastal New Eng­
land towns. Original settlers set up houses around a central location and
carved their farmlands out of the surrounding countryside. As a settlement
prospered, the land in its immediate vicinity came to be completely taken
up. As houses were erected farther and farther away from the central meet­
ing house, outlying residents found it inconvenient to come to church or
attend to other civic duties. In such cases, they sought recognition as a sepa­
rate village, with their own church, their own taxes, and their own elected
officials.
Here the trouble started. The settlers who lived toward the center of
town were reluctant to let their outlying neighbors break away. Every­
one paid taxes to support a minister for the town church, to maintain
the roads, and to care for the poor. If a chunk of the village split off,
revenue would be lost. Furthermore, outlying settlers would no longer
share the common burdens, such as guarding the town at night. So the
centrally located settlers usually resisted any movement by their more
distant neighbors to split off. Such disputes were a regular feature of
New England life.
66 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Key:
A � J\C�U$('T

I)• [).,(ender
@ � lwcuscd witch
A I\ I

I
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0 A
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I 0[) I)
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AA A A A

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DD

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\� A�Ai DP
D !) �
, IOI) cw ®
I
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I) D 0 .
DID
A I
I
p
I
I
''The Geography of Witchcraft" (after Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed,
Harvard University Press, 1974)

Salem Town had followed this pattern. Its first settlers located on a pen­
insula extending into Massachusetts Bay, where they pursued a prosperous
colonial trade. By 1668 four outlying areas had already become separate
towns. Now the "Salem Farmers," living directly to the west, were petition­
ing for a similar settlement, and the "Townsmen" were resisting. In 1672
Massachusetts's legislature allowed Salem Village to build its own meeting
house, but in other matters, the village remained dependent. Salem Town
still collected village taxes, chose village constables, and arranged for village
roads. The colony's records include petition after petition from villagers
complaining about tax rates, patrol duties, boundary rulings.
Here, then, is one east-west split-between the village and the town. But
the line drawn on Boyer and Nissenbaum's map is within the village. What
cause would the village have for division?
Many causes, the records indicate-chief among them the choice of
a minister. When the village built its own meeting house, it chose James
Bayley to be its pastor in 1673. Soon enough, however, some churchgo­
ers began complaining. Bayley didn't attend regularly to his private prayers.
Church members had not been fully consulted before his selection. After
a flurry of petitions and counterpetitions, Bayley left in 1680, and George
Burroughs was hired. Three years later, Burroughs left in another dispute.
He was succeeded by Deodat Lawson, who lasted through four more years
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds efSakm 67

q 3
1.. f L ES

WENHAM

�lloute
S.-111• 0
Cl
ROYAL ..
D GrlllmlJI
00
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0 D
.. Q
0 0

cc..r, "-b1i D
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1,.,
SALEMI IN 1892 "I
<t (
0
1.oc.tmQN$ IN $ALEM ifOWN lJ'
I Courthou. 6 Si.hop
:Z Prioon 7 Corwin
:u.t-•"11 hou• s -...
4 il'la:e of ll!<ecurion 9 C'>odrMiy
iii Er'1floh

"Salem in 1692" (From The Pursuit ofLiberty: A Histury ofthe American Peopk, vol. 1,
by R. Jackson Wilson, et al. Copyright 1966 by HarperCollins College Publishers.
Reprinted by permission of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.)

of quarrels. Finally, Samuel Parris occupied the pulpit after 1688. His term
was equally stormy, and in 1696 his opponents finally succeeded in starving
him out of the job by refusing to collect taxes to pay his salary.
The maneuverings that went on during the years of bickering seem bewil­
deringly complex. But Boyer and Nissenbaum recognized that the church
records, as well as the petitions and counterpetitions, provided a key to local
divisions. When the lists from the different quarrels were compared, Boyer
and Nissenbaum found that the same names were being grouped together.
The people who supported James Bayley usually supported George Bur­
roughs and then opposed the second two ministers. Conversely, the sup­
porters of Deodat Lawson and Samuel Parris had been the people who
complained about Bayley and Burroughs. And-here is the link-the two
lists from those disputes coincide closely with the divisions in 1692 between
accusers and accused.
Suddenly the Salem witch trials take on an entirely new appearance. Instead
of being a dramatic disruption that appears out of nowhere in a village kitchen
and then disappears equally suddenly at the end of ten months, it becomes an
elaboration of a quarrel that has gone on for nearly twenty years!
68 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

What lay behind the divisions? One reading of the evidence suggests that
the larger split between Salem Town and Salem Village was reflected in the
village itself, with the villagers on the east retaining enough in common with
the town to continue their affiliation and the westerners favoring complete
separation. Boyer and Nissenbaum argue that the division also went beyond
the simple geographical one to a difference in lifestyle. Salem Town was
becoming one of the major commercial centers of New England. It boasted
a growing merchant class whose wealth would soon support the building of
fine mansions. By contrast, the farmers in the western portion of Salem Vil­
lage were more traditional: they practiced subsistence farming, led spartan
daily lives, and were more suspicious of the commercial habits of offering
credit and making speculative investments. Worse, the Salem farmers found
themselves increasingly hard-pressed. The land available in the village was
dwindling. What land there was proved less fertile than the broad plains on
the eastern side of the village.
Look, too, at the occupations of the accused witches and their defenders.
Many lived along the Ipswich Road, a route that passed by the village rather
than through it, a main thoroughfare for travelers and for commerce. The
tradespeople who had set up shop there included a carpenter, sawmill opera­
tor, shoemaker, and miller. And of course there were the taverns, mainstays
of travelers, yet always slightly suspect to Puritans. The people along the
Ipswich Road were not rich, most of them, but their commercial links were
with Salem Town and with outsiders. They were small-scale entrepreneurs
rather than farmers. Out of twenty-one villagers who lived along or near the
road, only two signed petitions linking them with the western faction; thir­
teen signed petitions linking them with the eastern faction. Tavern keeper
John Proctor was hanged as a witch; his wife Elizabeth barely escaped with
her life.
Boyer and Nissenbaum's reconstruction of village factions thus suggests
an alternate way of looking at the Salem trials. Traditional accounts place
Samuel Parris and his supporters as leaders of the village, terrorizing inno­
cent villagers and controlling the trials. Certainly Parris's supporters had
their day in 1692, but from the longer perspective they appear to have been
fighting a losing battle. If Boyer and Nissenbaum are correct, the Salem
trials were an indirect yet anguished protest of a group of villagers whose
agrarian way of life was being threatened by the rising commercialism of
Salem Town.
The brilliance of Boyer and Nissenbaum's research lay in placing the
individual dramas of Salem into a larger social context. But their maps are
not the only maps that can be drawn, nor their connections the only con­
nections to be made. Boyer and Nissenbaum focused their attention on
Salem Village. But as the witchcraft trials gained momentum, the fever
spread to a few neighboring villages. In the summer of 1692, several of the
possessed women of Salem were invited to Andover by concerned residents.
The resulting round of accusations led to the arrest of nearly forty Andover
villagers. A month later, a smaller outbreak centered in the fishing port of
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 69

Gloucester, where six people were arrested. Several more of the accused
from Salem had Gloucester ties. All these people were tried by the same
court that dealt with the Salem cases.
Taking these additional episodes into account makes it more difficult to
generalize about embattled farmers arrayed against a rising commercialism.
Gloucester was a fishing port, while Andover, though it was just as agrarian
as Salem Village, had no commercial "parent" the likes of Salem Town. But
if rising commercialism was not the only, or primary, social factor influenc­
ing the Salem outbreak, what then?
Several historians, most recently Mary Beth Norton, have explored the
connections between the trials and New England's Indian wars. Memories
of King Philip's War of 1676 lingered in the region for many years, leaving
inhabitants anxious and uneasy, especially along the frontier. Then came a
new outbreak of violence in 1689,
A new outbreak ofIndian-white which the settlers referred to as
violence on the Maine frontier left its "the second Indian war." In Janu­
mark on many of the women affiicted ary 1692, just as the witchcraft
by witch torments. controversy was getting started,
word came from York, Maine,
that Indians had massacred residents there. Indeed, a number of the accusers
at the Salem trials experienced :firsthand the horrors of the conflict. Mercy
Lewis-one of the principal accusers-only two years earlier had seen her
mother, father, sister, and brother murdered in an Indian attack.
Analyzing the chronology of the trials, Norton pointed out that the
number of witchcraft accusations rose sharply only in April 1692. It was at
this point that Abigail Hobbs was brought before the magistrates because
of her reputation for being flippant about the spreading crisis. (She was
"not afraid of anything," she is said to have boasted, because she had
"Sold her selfe boddy & Soull to the old boy"-that is, to Satan.) During
the late 1680s, Hobbs had lived for some time along the Maine frontier.
Under hostile questioning from the magistrates, she admitted that she
had covenanted there with the devil-while "at Casko-bay." Having thus
confessed, she quickly turned into an enthusiastic prosecution witness.
Before her confession on April 1 7, only ten people had been charged
with witchcraft. In the seven weeks that followed, the total jumped to
sixty-eight. The spectral visions of Abigail Hobbs and Mercy Lewis led
to the indictment of a number of folk from Maine, chief among them the
Reverend George Burroughs, who seemed the ringleader of the devilish
conspiracy, in the eyes of many. The anxieties spawned by the frontier
attacks, argued Norton, were what pushed the Salem hysteria beyond
the bounds of the usual witchcraft trials of seventeenth-century New
England.
In addition to the fear of Indian "devils," did the accusers perhaps fear reli­
gious demons? For years the colony's ruling Congregationalists had worried
about the heresies spread by Quakers, members of the Society of Friends. In
the 1650s and 1660s, Massachusetts Bay hanged four Quaker missionaries
70 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

on the Boston Common. Other members of this Protestant sect had been
whipped,thrown into prison,or driven from the colony.The Quaker belief
that every person possessed his or her own divine inner light seemed to Con­
gregationalists to suggest the heretical notion that God could speak directly
to individuals.Even more disquieting,Friends caught up in their enthusiasm
would "quake " when the holy spirit possessed them,behavior that seemed all
too much like the fits of the Salem afflicted. "Diabolical Possession was the
thing which did dispose and encline men unto Quakerism," warned Boston
minister Cotton Mather,the son of Increase,in 1689.
By 1692, Congregationalists no longer had the power to persecute Quak­
ers,for Massachusetts' new charter guaranteed toleration to all Protestants.
Yet many ordinary folk remained suspicious, and within Essex County, the
largest concentration of Quakers lived in Salem and Gloucester.In Andover
too, Quaker connections seemed to figure in the arrests. Rebecca Nurse,
who was pious and well respected in other ways, had taken an orphaned
Quaker boy into her family.John and Elizabeth Proctor,the tavern keepers,
counted a large number of Quakers among Elizabeth's family.

"WOMEN ALONE"
While Boyer,Nissenbaum,and other historians pursued correlations based
on the social geography of witchcraft, another striking connection can be
made.That connection is the link between witchcraft and gender.
Out of the 178 accused Salem witches who can be identified by name,
more than 3 out of 4 were female.And nearly half of the accused men were
husbands, sons, or other relatives of accused women. The gender gap wid­
ens further when witchcraft outside Salem is examined. Of 147 additional
accused witches in seventeenth-century New England, 82 percent were
women.In the cases that actually came to trial,34 involved women and only
7 involved men. Of the women tried, 53 percent were convicted. Of the
men, only 2 were convicted, or 29 percent.And of those people who were
not only convicted but executed,women outnumbered men 15 to 2.
When historian Carol Karlsen examined the trial records, she found
that the authorities tended to treat accused women differently from men.
Magistrates and ministers often put pressure on women to confess their
guilt. In New England cases (excluding Salem), when that pressure led a
woman to confess a "familiarity with Satan," she was invariably executed,
in accordance with the biblical command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live." But when men were accused,pressure was seldom applied to make
them confess. In fact, confessions from men were not always accepted. In
1652 one John Broadstreet of Rowley admitted having familiarity with
Satan.The court ordered him whipped and fined twenty shillings "for tell­
ing a lie." In 1674 Christopher Brown confessed to "discoursing with ...
the devil," but the court rejected his statement as being "inconsistent with
truth."
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds ofSalem 71

Such evidence suggests that, by and large, most seventeenth-century New

Englanders expected women to be witches, whereas men who confessed were
seldom believed. But why should
Why was it that more women than women be singled out for such
men were accused ofwitchcraft? attention?
Part of the answer, Karlsen
argues, lay in the cultural position of women. Like Martin Luther and other
Reformation theologians, the Puritans exalted the role of motherhood over
the chaste life of the convent; they saw women as partners and helpmates in
marriage. Even so, Puritans retained a distinctly hierarchical conception of
marriage. They viewed families as miniature commonwealths, with the hus­
band as the ruler and his family as willing subjects. "A true wife accounts her
subjection [as] her honor and freedom," noted Governor John Winthrop of
Massachusetts.
A wife's unequal status was reflected legally as well: she was known in law
as a fame cov ert one whose identity was "covered" by that of her husband.
-

As such, she had no right to buy or sell property, to sue or be sued, or to

make contracts. Similarly, the patterns of inheritance in New England were
male dominated. A husband might leave his widow property-indeed, the
law required him to leave her at least a third of his estate. But she was to
"have and enjoy" that property only "during [the] term of her natural life."
She could not waste or squander it, for it was passed on to the family's heirs
at her death. Similarly, daughters might inherit property, but if they were
already married, it belonged to the husband. If a young woman had not yet
married, property usually seems to have been held for her, "for improve­
ment," until she married.
Thus the only sort of woman who held any substantial economic power
was a widow who had not remarried. Such a woman was known as a feme
sole, or "woman alone." She did have the right to sue, to make contracts, and
to buy or sell property. Even when remarrying, a widow could sometimes
protect her holdings by having her new husband sign a prenuptial contract,
guaranteeing before marriage that the wife would keep certain property
as her own. In male-dominated New England, these protections made the
fame sole stand out as someone who did not fit comfortably into the ordinary
scheme of things.
So, women in Puritan society were generally placed in subordinate roles.
At the same time, a significant number of accused witches were women who
were not subordinate in some way. In refusing to conform to accepted ste­
reotypes, they threatened the traditional order of society and were more
likely to be accused of subverting it as witches.
A woman might stand out, for example, through a contentious, argumen­
tative nature. If a woman's duty was to submit quietly to the rule of men
and to glory in "subjection," then quite a few witches refused to conform to
the accepted role. We have already seen how Sarah Good's "muttering and
scolding extreamly" were perceived by Salem Villagers to have caused the
death of cattle. Trial records are filled with similar accusations.
72 An'ER THE FACT: THE ART OF HlSTORICAL DETECTION

Older women-especially
those who were reputed to
have medical knowledge of
herbs and potions-often
came under suspicion of
witchcraft both in England
and in America. This
English drawing of 1622
portrays the stereotypical
willful older womant a
supposed witch by the
name ofJenner Dibble.
She was said to have been
attended for forty years
by a spirit in the shape
of a great black cat called
Gibb.

Often, more than short tempers were at stake. A remarkably high per­
centage of accused women were fames sole in an economic sense. Of the 124
witches whose inheritance patterns can be reconstructed from surviving
records, as many as 71 (57 percent) lived or had lived in families with no
male heirs. Another 14 accused witches were the daughters or granddaugh­
ters of witches who did not have brothers or sons to inherit their property.
This figure is at least twice the number that would be expected, given the
usual percentage offemes sole in the New England population. Furthermore,
of the women executed at Salem, more than half had inherited or stood to
inherit their own property. Such statistics suggest why witchcraft controver­
sies so often centered on women.

TANGLED WEBS

The early modern world, including that of colonial New England, was
uncertain, unpredictable, full of chance. Amidst so many unpredictable trag­
edies, witchcraft offered an explanation for misfortunes that otherwise might
have seemed inexplicable.
Unlike diviners or witch doctors, historians have followed the example
of the natural sciences in seeking testable, rational links between cause and
effect. Yet the longing for a simple, coherent story remains strong. We all
wish to see the confusing welter of events lock together with a clarity that
leads us, like Archimedes, to cry Eureka-conversion hysteria! Or Eureka­
the pressures of the new commercial economy! Or Eureka-femes sole!
Instead, the discipline of small-scale, local history forces humility. As his­
torians sift the web of relationships surrounding the Salem outbreak, most
 The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Salem 73

have come to believe that its causes are multiple rather than singular. "Irre­
ducible to any single source of social strain," concludes Christine Heyrman,
the scholar who traced out the Quaker connections to witchcraft. No single
"governing explanation," argues Bernard Rosenthal. The very fact that the
witchcraft outbreak did not recur elsewhere in New England suggests that
the magnitude of Salem's calamity depended on an unusual combination of
psychological and social factors.
Certainly, an agrarian faction in the village did not consciously devise the
trials to punish their commercial rivals or Quaker-loving neighbors. Nor
was the male Puritan patriarchy launching a deliberate war against women.
But the invisible world of witchcraft did provide a framework that ampli­
fied village anxieties and focused them. As the accusations of a small cir­
cle of young women widened and as controversy engulfed the town, it was
only natural that long-standing quarrels and prejudices were drawn into the
debate. The interconnections between a people's religious beliefs, their hab­
its of commerce, even their dream and fantasy lives, are intricate and fine,
entwined with one another like the delicate root system of a growing plant.
Historians who limit their examination to a small area of time and space
are able, through persistent probing, to untangle the strands of emotions,
motivations, and social structures that provided the context for those slow
processions to the gallows on Witch's Hill.
74 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

David Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days ofJudgment (New York, 1988) provides
an excellent introduction to the way witchcraft fits into the larger belief sys­
tems of popular religion and magic. Chadwick Hansen's Witchcraft at Salem
(New York, 1969) presents the most detailed case for conversion hysteria
among the accusers. But Bernard Rosenthal, in Salem Story: Reading the
Witch Trials of 1692 (New York, 1993), argues convincingly that conscious
deception played some role, especially among the core accusers. Paul Boyer
and Stephen Nissenbaum apply the techniques of social history with lucidity
and grace in Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA,
197 4). Other historians, however, have been skeptical about leaning too hard
on rising commercialism as the outbreak's chief catalyst. For the contribu­
tion of anxiety over war and Indian raids, see the authoritative study by Mary
Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New
York, 2002). Because of all the attention given the Salem trials, it is impor­
tant to remember that most colonists' attitudes toward witchcraft were more
ambiguous. For an instructive comparison, see Richard Godbeer's study of
a contemporaneous trial (this one in Fairfield, Connecticut), Escaping Salem:
The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New York, 2004).
CHAPTER 4

Declaring Independence

Do actions speak louder than words? When analyzing a document

like the Declaration ofIndependence, historians sometimes heed the
old proverb, "Watch what I do, not what I say. "

Good historians share with magicians a talent for elegant sleight of hand.
In both professions, the manner of execution conceals much of the work that
makes the performance possible. Like the magician's trapdoors, mirrors, and
other hidden props, historians' primary sources are essential to their task.
But the better that historians are at their craft, the more likely they will focus
their readers' attention on the historical scene itself and not on the support­
ing documents.
Contrary to prevailing etiquette, we have gone out of our way to call
attention to the problems of evidence to be solved before a historical narra­
tive is presented in its polished form. As yet, however, we have not examined
in detail the many operations to be performed on a single document. What
at first seems a relatively simple job of collecting, examining, and cataloging
can become remarkably complex.
So let us narrow our focus even more than in the previous two chapters
by concentrating not on a region (Virginia) or a village (Salem), but on one
document. The document in question is more important than most, yet brief
enough to be read in several minutes: the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration, of course, is one of the most celebrated documents
in the nation's history. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, adopted by the Sec­
ond Continental Congress, published for the benefit of the world, hailed
in countless patriotic speeches, it is today displayed within the rotunda of
the National Archives, encased in a glass container filled with helium to
prevent any long-term deterioration from oxygen. Ever y schoolchild knows
that Congress declared the colonies' independence by issuing the document
on July 4, 1776. Nearly ever yone has seen the painting by John Trumbull
that depicts members of Congress receiving the parchment for signing on
that day.
So the starting place is familiar enough. Yet there is a good deal to estab­
lish even when unpacking the basic facts. Under what circumstances did
Jefferson write the Declaration? What people, events, or other documents

75
76 AFTER THE FACT: Tmt ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

The Committee of Five-Adams, Sherman, Livingston, Jefferson, and Franklin­

present their work to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, in
a detail from The Declaration efIndependence by John Trumbull. When Hancock
finally put his elaborate signature to the engrossed copy, he is reported to have said,
"There! John Bull can read my name without spectacles, and may now double his
reward of £500 for my head."

influenced him? Only when such questions are answered in more detail does
it become clear that quite a few of the "fact.s" enumerated in the previous
paragraph are either misleading or incorrect. And the confusion begins in
trying to answer the most elementary questions about the Declaration.

THE CREATION OF A TEXT

In May 1776 Thomas Jefferson traveled to Philadelphia, as befit a proper
gentleman, in a coach-and-four with two attending slaves. He promptly took
his place on the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental Congress.
Even a year after fighting had broken out at Lexington and Concord, Con­
gress was still debating whether the quarrel with England could be patched
up. Sentiment for independence ran high in many areas but by no means
everywhere. The greatest reluctance lay in the middle colonies, particu­
larly in Pennsylvania, where moderates like john Dickinson still hoped for
reconciliation.
 Declaring Independence 77

Such cautious sentiments infuriated the more radical delegates, especially

John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts. The two Adamses had worked
for independence from the opening days of Congress but found the going
slow. America, complained John, was "a great, unwieldy body. It is like a
large fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailers must wait for the dull­
est and the slowest." Jefferson also favored independence, but he lacked the
Adamses' taste for political infighting. While the men from Massachusetts
pulled their strings in Congress, Jefferson only listened attentively and took
notes. Thirty-three years old, he was the youngest delegate, and no doubt
his age contributed to his diffidence. Privately, he conversed more easily
with friends, sprawling casually in a chair with one shoulder cocked high,
the other low, and his long legs extended. He got along well with the other
delegates.
The debate over independence sputtered on fitfully until late May, when
Jefferson's colleague Richard Henry Lee arrived from Williamsburg, deter­
mined to force Congress to act. On Friday, June 7, based on orders from
Virginia, he rose in Congress and offered the following resolutions:

That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and indepen­
dent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and
that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is,
and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for form­
ing foreign alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective
colonies for their consideration and approbation.

On Saturday and again on Monday, moderates and radicals debated

the propositions. The secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, cau­
tiously recorded in his minutes only that "certain resolutions" were "moved
and discussed"-the certain resolutions, of course, being treasonous in the
extreme.
Still, sentiment was running with the radicals. When delegate James
Wilson of Pennsylvania announced that he felt ready to vote for indepen­
dence, Congress set the wheels in motion by appointing a five-member com­
mittee "to prepare a Declaration to the effect of the said first resolution."
The events that followed can be traced, in bare outline at least, in a modern
edition of Secretary Thomson's minutes (Journals ofthe Continental Congress:
1774-1789). From it we learn that on June 11, 1776, Congress constituted
Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert
Livingston as a "Committee of Five" responsible for drafting the declaration.
Then for more than two weeks, Thomson's journal remains silent on the
subject. Only on Friday, June 28, does it note that the committee "brought
in a draught" of an independence declaration.
On Monday, July 1, Congress resolved itself into a "Committee of the
Whole," in which it could freely debate the sensitive question without
78 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

leaving any official record of debate or disagreement. (Thomson's minutes

did not record the activities of committees.) On July 2 the Committee of the
Whole went through the motions of "reporting back " to Congress (that is,
to itself ).The minutes note only that Richard Lee's resolution, then "being
read " in formal session, "was agreed to."
Thus the official journal makes it clear that Congress voted for indepen­
dence onJuly 2, notJuly4, adopting Richard Henry Lee's original proposal of
June 7. When John Adams wrote
As it turned out, John Adams picked home on July 3 to his wife, Abi­
the wrong date for celebrating gail, he enthusiastically predicted
American independence. that July 2 would be remembered
as "the most memorable Epoca in
the History of America.I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by suc­
ceeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.... It ought to be
solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells,
Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other
from this Time forward forever more."
As it turned out, Adams picked the wrong date for the fireworks.Although
Congress had officially broken the tie with England, the declaration explain­
ing the action had not yet been approved. On July 3 and 4 Congress again
met as a Committee of the Whole. Only then was the formal declaration
reported back, accepted, and sent to the printer. Thomson's journal notes,
"The foregoing declaration was, by order of Congress, engrossed, and signed
by the following members...." Here is the enactment familiar to everyone:
the "engrossed " parchment (one written in large, neat letters ) beginning
with its bold "In Congress, July 4, 1776," and concluding with the president
of the Continental Congress's signature, so flourishing that we still speak of
putting our John Hancock to paper. Below that, the signatures of fifty-five
other delegates appear more modestly inscribed.
If mention of the Declaration in Thomson's minutes concluded with the
entry on July 4, schoolchildren might emerge with their memories reason­
ably intact. But later entries of the journal suggest that in all likelihood, the
Declaration was not signed on July 4 after all, but on August 2. To muddy
the waters further, not all the signers were in Philadelphia even on August 2.
Some could not have signed the document until October or November.
So the upshot of the historian's preliminary investigation is that (1) Congress
declared independence on the second of July, not the fourth; (2) most mem­
bers officially signed the engrossed parchment only on the second of August;
and (3) all the signers of the Declaration never met together in the same room
at once, despite the appearances in John Trumbull's painting.In the matter
of establishing the basic facts surrounding a document, historians are all too
ready to agree with John Adams's bewildered search of his recollections in
old age: "What are we to think of history? When in less than 40 years, such
diversities appear in the memories of living men who were witnesses."
Yet even with the basic facts in place, many important points remain to
be answered about the Declaration's creation.Although Jefferson drafted it,
 Declaring Independence 79

what did the Committee of Five contribute? If the delegates made changes
during the congressional debate on July 3 and 4, for what purpose? A histo­
rian will want to know which parts of the completed document were most
controversial; surviving copies of earlier drafts could shed valuable light on
these questions.
The search for accurate information about the Declaration's drafting
began even while the protagonists were still living. Some forty years after
the signing, both Jefferson and John Adams tried to set down the sequence
of events. Adams recalled the affable and diplomatic Jefferson suggesting
that Adams write the first draft. "I will not," replied Adams.
"You shall do it," persisted Jefferson.
"Oh no!"
"Why will you not do it? You ought to do it."
"I will not."
"Reasons enough." Adams ticked them off. "Reason 1st. You are a Virgin­
ian and a Virginian ought to be at the head of this business. Reason 2nd. I
am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. Rea­
son 3rd. You can write ten times better than I can."
"Well," said Jefferson, "if you are decided, I will do as well as I can."
Jefferson, for his part, did not remember this bit of diplomatic shuttle­
cock.In a letter to James Madison in 182 3 he asserted that the Committee of
5 met .. . [and] they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the
draught. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee I
communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams requesting their
corrections; .. . and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with
the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own hand­
writing.Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal [that is,
changes of phrasing, not substance].
So far, so good. Jefferson's "original paper"-which he endorsed on the
document itself as the "original Rough draught"-is preserved in the Library
of Congress. Indeed, the draft is even rougher than Jefferson suggested. As
historian Carl Becker pointed out,

the inquiring student, coming to it for the first time, would be astonished, per­
haps disappointed, if he expected to find in it nothing more than the "original
paper ... with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in
their own handwriting." He would find, for example, on the first page alone
nineteen corrections, additions or erasures besides those in the handwriting of
Adams and Franklin. It would probably seem to him at first sight a bewilder­
ing document, with many phrases crossed out, numerous interlineations, and
whole paragraphs enclosed in brackets.

These corrections make the rough draft more difficult to read, but in the end
also more rewarding. For the fact is, Jefferson continued to record on this
copy successive changes of the Declaration, not only by Adams and Franklin,
but by Congress in its debates of July 3 and 4.
80 APTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HlsTORICAL DETECTION

Jefferson wrote out a rough draft of the Declaration, which this illustration from
1897 envisions him reading to Franklin at his lodgings. In 1883 those lodgings were
still standing, dwarfed by a four-story building next door that housed a tavern.

Thus by careful comparison and reconstruction, we can accurately estab­

lish the sequence of changes made in one crucial document, from the time
it was first drafted, through corrections in committee, to debate and further
amendment in Congress, and finally on to the engrossed parchment famil­
iar to history. The changes were not slight. In the end, Congress removed
about a quarter ofJefferson's original language. Eighty-six alterations were
made by one person or another, including Jefferson, over those fateful three
weeks of 1776.

THE TACTICS OF INTERPRETATION

Having sketched the circumstances of the Declaration's composition, the

historian must attempt the more complicated task of interpretation. And
here, historians' paths are most likely to diverge. To determine a document's
historical significance requires placing it within the larger context of events.
There is no single method for doing this, of course. If there were, historians
would all agree on their reconstructions of the past, and history would be a
 Declaring Independence 81

good deal duller. On the other hand, historians do at least share certain tac­
tics of analysis that have consistently yielded profitable results.
What follows, then, is one set of tactical approaches to the Declaration.
These approaches are by no means the only ways of making sense of the
document. But they do suggest some range of the options historians nor­
mally call upon.
The document is read, first, to understand its surface content. This step may
appear too obvious to bear mentioning, but not so. The fact is, most histo­
rians examine a document from a particular and potentially limiting view­
point. A diplomatic historian, for instance, may approach the Declaration
with an eye to the role it played in cementing a formal alliance with France.
A historian of political theory might prefer to focus on the theoretical justifi­
cations of independence. Both perspectives are legitimate, but by beginning
with such specific interests, historians risk prejudging the document. They
are likely to notice only the kinds of evidence they are seeking.
So it makes sense to begin by putting aside any specific questions and
approaching the Declaration as a willing, even uncritical reader. Ask only
the most basic questions. How is the document organized? What are its
major points, briefly summarized?

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States ofAmerica.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them with another, and
to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to
which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation.-We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with cer­
tain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,-That
whenever any Farm of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Govern­
ment, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happi­
ness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should
not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience
hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffer­
able, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accus­
tomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide
new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance
of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to
alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King
82 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having

in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.-He has refused his
Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.-He
has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing impor­
tance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained;
and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.-He has
refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people,
unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Leg­
islature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.-He has
called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant
from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatigu­
ing them into compliance with his measures.-He has dissolved Representa­
tive Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the
rights of the people.-He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions,
to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of
Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State
remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from with­
out, and convulsions within.-He has endeavoured to prevent the population
of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of
Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.-He has obstructed
the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing
judiciary powers.-He has made judges dependent on his Will alone, for the
tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.-He
has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers
to harass our people, and eat out their substance.-He has kept among us, in
times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.-He
has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil
power.-He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to
our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their
Acts of pretended Legislation.-For quartering large bodies of armed troops
among us:-For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any
Murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:-For
cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:-For imposing Taxes on us
without our Consent:-For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial
by Jury:-For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:­
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province,
establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries
so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the
same absolute rule into these Colonies:-For taking away our Charters, abol­
ishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our
Governments:-For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring them­
selves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.-He has
abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging
War against us.-He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our
 Declaring Independence 83

towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.-He is at this time transporting
large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, deso­
lation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head
of a civilized nation.-He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive
on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the execution­
ers of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.-He
has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring
on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known
rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and condi­
tions. In every state of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in
the most humble terms: our repeated Petitions have been answered only by
repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which
may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We
been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them
from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrant­
able jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our
emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and
magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred
to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connec­
tions and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice
and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which
denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind,
Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in Gen­

eral Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for
the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good
People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United
Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and independent States; that they
are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political
connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be
totally dissolved: and that as Free and independent States, they have full Power
to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to
do all other Acts and Things which independent States may of right do.-And
for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of
divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes
and our sacred Honor.

As befits a reasoned public document, the Declaration can be separated

fairly easily into its key parts. The first sentence begins by informing the
reader of the document's purpose. The colonies, having declared their inde­
pendence from England, intend to announce "the causes which impel them
to the separation."
The causes that follow, however, are not all of a piece. They break nat­
urally into two sections: the first, a theoretical justification of revolution,
and the second, a list of the specific grievances that justify this revolution.
84 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Because the first section deals in general, "self-evident" truths, it is the one
most often remembered and quoted. "All men are created equal," "unalien­
able Rights," "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," "consent of the
governed"-these principles have meaning far beyond the circumstances of
the colonies in the summer of 177 6.
But the Declaration devotes far greater space to a list of British actions
that Congress labeled "a long train of abuses and usurpations" designed to
"reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism." Because the Declaration
admits that revolution should never be undertaken lightly, it proceeds to
demonstrate that English rule has been not merely inconvenient, but so full
of "repeated injuries" that "absolute Tyranny" is the result. What threatens
Americans most, the Declaration proclaims, is not the individual measures,
but the existence of a deliberate plot by the king to deprive a "free people"
of their liberties.
The final section of the Declaration turns to the colonial response. Here
the Declaration incorporates Richard Lee's resolution passed on July 2 and
ends with the signers solemnly pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred
honor to support the new government.
Having begun with this straightforward reading, the historian is less likely
to wrench out of context a particular passage, magnifying it at the expense
of the rest of the document. Yet taken by itself, the reading of "surface con­
tent" may distort a document's import. Significance, after all, depends on
the circumstances under which a document was created. Thus historians
must always seek to place their evidence in context.
The context of a document may be established, in pan, by asking what the docu­
ment might have said but did not. When Jefferson retired to his second-floor
lodgings on the outskirts of Philadelphia, placed a portable writing desk on
his lap, and put pen to paper, he had many options open to him. Yet the mod­
em reader, seeing only the final product, is tempted to view the document
as the logical, even inevitable result of Jefferson's deliberations. Perhaps it
was, but the historian needs to ask how it might have been otherwise. What
might Jefferson and the Congress have declared but did not?
We can get a better sense of what Congress and Jefferson rejected by look­
ing at a declaration made some ten years earlier by another intercolonial
gathering, the Stamp Act Con­
gress. Like Jefferson's, this decla­ A decade earlier, the Stamp Act
ration, protesting the Stamp Act Congress was unwilling to go as
as unjust, began by outlining gen­ far as the Continental Congress in
eral principles. In reading the first separating from Great Britain.
three resolves, note the difference
between their premises and those of the Declaration.

I. That his Majesty's Subjects in these Colonies, owe the same Alle­
giance to the Crown of Great-Britain, that is owing from his Subjects
born within the Realm, and all due Subordination to that August Body
the Parliament of Great-Britain.
 Declaring Independence 85

II. That his Majesty's Liege Subjects in these Colonies, are entitled
to all the inherent Rights and Liberties of his Natural born Subjects,
within the Kingdom of Great-Britain.

III. That it is inseparably essential to the Freedom of a People, and the

undoubted Right of Englishmen, that no Taxes be imposed on them, but
with their own Consent, given personally, or by their Representatives.

The rights emphasized by the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 differ sig­
nificantly from those emphasized in 1776. The Stamp Act resolutions claim
that colonials are entitled to "all the inherent Rights and Liberties" of "Sub­
jects, within the Kingdom of Great-Britain." They possess "the undoubted
Right of Englishmen." Nowhere in Jefferson's Declaration are the rights
of Englishmen mentioned as justification for protesting the king's conduct.
Instead, the Declaration magnifies what the Stamp Act only mentions in
passing-natural rights inherent in the "Freedom of a People," whether they
be English subjects or not.
The shift from English rights to natural rights resulted from the changed
political situation. In 1765 Americans were seeking relief within the Brit­
ish imperial system. Logically, they cited rights they felt due them as Brit­
ish subjects. But in 1776 the Declaration was renouncing all ties with its
parent nation. If the colonies were no longer a part of Great Britain, what
good would it do to cite the rights of Englishmen? Thus the natural rights
"endowed" all persons "by their Creator" took on paramount importance.
The Declaration makes another striking omission. Nowhere in the long
list of grievances does it use another word that appears in the first resolve
of the Stamp Act Congress-"Parliament." The omission is all the more
surprising because the Revolutionary quarrel had its roots in the dispute
over Parliament's right to tax and regulate the colonies. The Sugar Act, the
Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Tea Act, the Coercive Acts, the Que­
bec Act-all place Parliament at the center of the dispute. The Declaration
alludes to those legislative measures but always in the context of the king's
actions, not Parliament's. Doing so admittedly required a bit of evasion: in
laying out parliamentary abuses, Jefferson complained, rather indirectly,
that the king had combined with "others"-namely Parliament-"to subject
us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our
laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation."
Obviously, the omission came about for much the same reason that Jefferson
excluded all mention of the "rights of Englishmen." At the Stamp Act Con­
gress of 1765, virtually all Americans were willing to grant Parliament some
jurisdiction over the colonies-not the right to lay taxes without American
representation, certainly, but at least the right to regulate colonial trade.
Thus Congress noted (in Resolve I) that Parliament deserved "all due
Subordination."
By 177 5 more radical colonials would not grant Parliament any
authority over the colonies. They had come to recognize what an early
86 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

pamphleteer had noted, that Americans could be just as easily "ruined by

the powers of legislation as by those of taxation." The Boston Port Bill,
which closed Boston harbor, was not a tax. Nor did it violate any tradi­
tional right. Yet Parliament used it to take away Americans' freedoms.
Although many colonials had totally rejected all parliamentary author­
ity by 177 5, most had not yet advocated independence. How, then, were
the colonies related to England if not through Parliament? The only link
was through the king. The colonies possessed their own sovereign legisla­
tures, but they shared with all British subjects one monarch. Thus when the
final break with England came, the Declaration carefully laid all blame at the
king's feet. That was the connection that needed to be severed.
What the Declaration does not say, then, proves to be as important as
what it did say. Historians can recognize the importance of such unstated
premises by remembering that the actors in any drama possess more alterna­
tives than the ones they finally choose.
A document may be understood by seeking to reconstrnct the intellectual worlds
behind its words. We have already seen, in the cases of the De Soto expedi­
tion, slavery in Virginia, and witchcraft in Salem, the extent to which his­
tory involves the task of reconstructing whole societies from fragmentary
records. The same process applies to the intellectual worlds that lie behind
a document.
The need to perform this reconstruction is often hidden, however, because
the context of the English language has changed over the past two hundred
years-and not simply in obvious ways. For example, what would Jefferson
have made of the following excerpt out of a computer magazine?

Macworld's Holiday Gift Guide. It's holiday shopping season again. Mac­
world advises you on the best ways to part with your paycheck....It could be
an audio CD, but it could also be a CD-ROM containing anything from an
encyclopedia to a virtual planetarium to an art studio for the kids.

To begin with, terms like "audio CD" and "CD-ROM" would mystify Jef­
ferson simply because they come from a totally unfamiliar world. Beyond
the obvious, however, the excerpt contains words that might seem familiar
but would be deceptively so, because their meaning has changed over time.
Jefferson probably would recognize "planetarium," though he might pre­
fer the more common eighteenth-century term orrery. He would recognize
"virtual" as well. But a "virtual planetarium"? Today's notion of virtual real­
ity would be lost to him unless he read a good deal more about the computer
revolution.
Even more to the point, look at the innocuous phrase "It's holiday shop­
ping season again." The words would be completely familiar to Jefferson,
but the world that surrounds them certainly would not. To understand the
phrase, he would have to appreciate how much the Christmas holiday has
evolved into a major commercial event, bearing scant resemblance to any
eighteenth-century observance. (In John Adams's Puritan New England,
of course, even to celebrate Christmas would have been frowned upon as
 Declaring Independence 87

a popish superstition.) Or to make an even subtler linguistic point: unlike a

magazine article from the 19 5 Os, this one from the 1990s never uses the word
Christmas. The social reasons for this deliberate omission would undoubt­
edly interest Jefferson, for it reflects a multicultural nation sensitive to the
questions of equality and the separation of church and state. But unless he
were aware of the ways in which American society had evolved, Jefferson
would miss the implications hidden within language that to us seems reason­
ably straightforward.
By the same token, eighteenth-century documents may appear decep­
tively lucid to twentieth-century readers. When Jefferson wrote that all
men were "endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Sometimes the same word means
Rights," including "Life, Lib­ different things in different
erty and the pursuit of Happi­ centuries.
ness," the meaning seems clear.
But as essayist and historian Garry Wills has insisted, "To understand any
text remote from us in time, we must reassemble a world around that text.
The preconceptions of the original audience, its tastes, its range of refer­
ence, must be recovered, so far as that is possible."
In terms of reassembling Jefferson's world, historians have most often
followed Carl Becker in arguing that its center lay in the political philoso­
phy of John Locke. Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690) asserted
that all governments were essentially a compact between individuals based
on the principles of human nature. Locke speculated that if all the laws and
customs that had grown up in human society over the years were stripped
away, human beings would find themselves in "a state of perfect freedom to
order their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of
the law of nature." But because some individuals inevitably violate the laws
of nature-robbing or murdering or committing other crimes-people have
always banded together to make a compact, Locke suggested, agreeing to
create governments that will order human society. And just as people come
together to allow themselves to be governed, likewise they can overturn
those governments wherein the ruler has become a tyrant who "may do to all
his subjects whatever he pleases."
Jefferson's colleague Richard Henry Lee in later years commented that
Jefferson, in writing the Declaration, had merely "copied from Locke's
treatise on government." Yet as important as Locke was, his writings were
only one aspect of the Enlightenment tradition flourishing in the eighteenth
century. Jefferson shared with many European philosophes the belief that
human affairs should be studied as precisely as the natural world. Just as Sir
Isaac Newton in the 1680s had used mathematical equations to derive the
laws of gravity, optics, and planetary motion, so the philosophes of Jeffer­
son's day looked to quantify the study of the human psyche.
The results of such efforts seem quaint today, but the philosophes took
their work seriously. Garry Wills has argued that even more important to
Jefferson than Locke were the writings of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers,
88 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

An orrery, shown in this engraving from 1768, traced the orbits of the planets
around the sun. Hit was possible to discover the relationships within the natural
order, Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers reasoned, why not map the
relationships of the human psyche?

chief among them Francis Hutcheson. In 1725 Hutcheson attempted to quan­

tify such elusive concepts as morality. The result was a string of equations
in which qualities were abbreviated by letters (B benevolence, A
= ability,
=

S = self-love, I interest) and placed in their proper relations:

=

M = (B + S) X ABA + SA; and therefore

=

M-I
BA = M - SA M - I, and B
= =

A
Jefferson possessed a similar passion for quantification. He repeatedly
praised the American astronomer David Rittenhouse and his orrery, a mechan­
ical model of the solar system whose gears replicated the relative motions of
the earth, moon, and planets.Jefferson also applied classification and observa­
tion as a gentleman planter. If it were possible to discover the many relation­
ships within the natural order, he reasoned, farmers might better plant and
harvest to those rhythms. Even in the White House, Jefferson kept his eye
on the Washington markets and recorded the seasons' first arrivals of thirty­
seven different vegetables.
 Declaring Independence 89

Wills argues that]efferson conceived the "pursuit of Happiness" in equally

precise terms. Francis Hutcheson had suggested that a person's actions be
judged by how much happiness that person brought to other people."That
action is best," he argued, "which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the
greatest number." According to Enlightenment science, because happiness
could be quantified, a government's actions could be weighed in the balance
scales to discover whether they hindered a citizen's right to pursue happiness
as he or she saw fit. Thus, for Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness was not a
phrase expressing the vague hope that all Americans should have the chance
to live happily ever after.His language reflected the conviction that the sci­
ence of government, like the science of agriculture or celestial mechanics,
would gradually take its place in the advancing progress of humankind.
Jefferson, mind you, never said explicitly that he was relying on Scot­
tish moral philosophy when he wrote the Declaration.This is Garry Wills's
reconstruction, based on circumstantial evidence, such as the presence of
Francis Hutcheson's works in Jefferson's library and the topics Jefferson's
professors lectured on during his college years-and even, more generally,
what ideas and opinions were "in the air." Whether or not Wills's specific
case is convincing, his method of research is one that historians commonly
employ. By understanding the intellectual world from which a document
arose, we come to understand the document itself.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER?

More than a few historians, however, become uneasy about depending too
heavily on a genealogy of ideas. Certainly, a historian can speak of theories
as being "in the air" and of Jefferson, as it were, inhaling. But that approach
may neglect the noisy world outside his Philadelphia lodgings. ByJune 177 6
Congress was waging a war, and a hundred and one events demanded its
daily attention. The morning that Richard Henry Lee submitted his motion
for independence, delegates had to deal with troops being raised in South
Carolina and complaints about the gunpowder manufactured by a certain
Mr. Oswald of Eve's Mill. Over the following days they learned that the
British fleet had sailed from Halifax, on its way to attack New York City.
Events large and small kept Jefferson and the rest of Congress from sitting
down quietly to ponder over a single document.
Thus to understand the Declaration we must also set it within the context
of contemporary events. "What was Jefferson thinking about on the eve of
his authorship of the Declaration of Independence?" asked a recent biog­
rapher, Joseph Ellis. "The answer is indisputable. He was not thinking ...
about John Locke's theory of natural rights or Scottish commonsense phi­
losophy. He was thinking about Virginia's new constitution." Throughout
May and June, couriers brought news to Jefferson of doings in Williams­
burg, the capital of his own "country," as he called it. There, onJune 12, the
Virginia convention adopted a preamble to its state constitution, written by
90 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

George Mason. "All men are created equally free and independent and have
certain inherent and natural rights," wrote Mason, ". . . among which are
the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing
property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
These words reached Philadelphia little more than a week beforeJeffer­
son penned his immortal credo "that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The point is not to expose
Jefferson as a plagiarist, for he substantially improved Mason's version. Nor
is it to deny thatJohn Locke or Francis Hutcheson may have played a role
in shaping Jefferson's (and Mason's) thinking. But comparing Jefferson's
language with Mason's makes it clear how much Jefferson was affected by
actions around him rather than the books and words in his library.
Often enough, actions do speak louder than words. Yet a problem
remains. Despite the proverb about actions, we are still talking about words,
whetherJefferson's or George Mason's. The point of the maxim is that we
cannot always take words at face value-that often, actions are what reveal
true feelings. We need not reject the Declaration's heartfelt sentiments in
order to recognize that the Congress (or, for that matter, colonials them­
selves) may have had reasons for declaring independence that they did not
proclaim loudly.
Consider the vexed topic of slavery, especially relevant to a document
proclaiming that "all men are created equal." It has become commonplace
to point out the contradiction between the Declaration's noble embrace of
human liberties and the reality that many delegates to Congress, including
Jefferson, were slave owners; or similarly, the inconsistency between a decla­
ration of equality and the refusal to let women participate in the equal rights
of citizenship.
Although such contradictions seem now to be almost truisms, they
deserve to be pointed out again and again. Indeed, much of American his­
tory can be seen as an effort to work out the full meaning of "all men are cre­
ated equal"-whether in the Civil War, which ended slavery only after a vast
and bloody carnage, or at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, mounted
by women to proclaim an equality of the sexes in their own Declaration
of Sentiments. The theme could be applied to the populist and progressive
movements of the late nineteenth century, which challenged the monopoly
powers of big business, or to the twentieth-century debates over civil rights
and affirmative action. The implications of the Declaration have engaged
the republic for more than two centuries and will continue to do so.
So let's return to the notion of actions and examine the intriguing way in
which slavery appears in the Declaration. At first glance, it doesn't seem to
appear at all. The only allusion comes in the document's long list of griev­
ances, where Congress notes that the king has "excited domestic insurrections
amongst us"-a rather indirect way of saying that the king had encouraged
slaves to rise up against their patriot masters. The five words slip by so quickly
that we hardly notice them.
 Declaring Independence 91

Slavery did not slip by so quickly inJefferson's rough draft. His discussion
of the institution appeared not as a grace note, but as the climax of his long
list of grievances against the king:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred
rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended
him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to
incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great
Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought &
sold, he has prostituted his nega­
tive [that is, used his veto power] Jefferson� rough draft ofthe
for suppressing every legislative Declaration said a lot more about
attempt to prohibit or to restrain
slavery than what appeared in the
this execrable commerce. And that
final draft.
this assemblage of horrors might
want no fact of distinguishing die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in
arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by
murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former
crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he
urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The passage is both revealing and astonishing. It reveals, first, that Jef­
ferson was very much aware of the contradiction between slavery and the
Declaration's high sentiments. Not once but twice he speaks out. The
enslavement of black Africans violates the "most sacred rights of life and
liberty," he admits. And again: enslavement amounts to "crimes commit­
ted against the Liberties of one people." Yet in admitting the wrong, he
blames the king for it! Jefferson based his charge on the fact that several
times during the eighteenth century, Virginia's legislature passed a tariff
designed to put a brake on the importation of slaves. The lawmakers did
so not so much from humanitarian motives (although these were occasion­
ally mentioned) but because the colony's slave population was expanding
rapidly. Importing too many Africans would lower the price of domestic
slaves whom Virginia planters wanted to sell. The British administration,
however, consistently vetoed such laws-and thus the king had "prosti­
tuted his negative" to prevent the slave trade from being restrained. For
their part, white Georgians and South Carolinians were generally happy
to see the trade continue, as were many New England merchants whose
income depended on it.
To accuse the king of enslaving black colonials was far-fetched enough,
butJefferson then turned around and hotly accused the king of freeing black
colonials. In November 1775 the loyal Governor Dunmore ofVirginia pro­
claimed that any slave who deserted his master to fight for the king would
be freed. Dunmore's Proclamation, as it was called, outraged many white
patriots. Hence Jefferson called King George to account for the vile "crime"
of freeing slaves who remained loyal to the crown.
92 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

What the delegates in Congress thought of the passage does not survive.
But their actions spoke loudly. In the final draft, Jefferson's long passage
vanished. All that remained was the accusation that the king had "excited
domestic insurrections." Most likely Congress rejected Jefferson's logic as
being so strained that it could hardly withstand public scrutiny. The less
said, the better.

DECLARING FOR FREEDOM

Saying less, however, is not the same as saying nothing. By not deleting the
accusation regarding "domestic insurrections," Congress revealed that this
particular issue remained a sensitive one. Indeed, many other declarations of
independence, issued by various states and towns on their own, complained
loudly about Dunmore's Proclamation. Marylanders protested that slaves
"were proclaimed free, enticed away, trained and armed against their lawful
masters." Pennsylvanians objected that the British had incited "the negroes
to imbrue their hands in the blood of their masters." North Carolina echoed
that sentiment nearly word for word. The frequency of this complaint raises
a question. Leave aside for a moment the issue of white attitudes toward
slavery and liberty. How did the actions of African Americans affect the draft­
ers of the Declaration?
On the face of it, the chance of answering that question seems far-fetched.
The approximately 400,000 black slaves living in the colonies in 177 6 could
not leave a trail of resolutions or declarations behind them, for most were
not allowed to. Yet the Declaration's complaint that Britain was stirring up
American slaves brings to mind the similar laments of proslavery advocates
in the 1850s and of segregationists during the 1950s and 1960s. Both repeat­
edly blamed "outside agitators" for encouraging southern blacks to assert
their civil rights. In the eighteenth century, the phrase most commonly
used was "instigated insurrection." "The newspapers were full of Publica­
tions calculated to excite the fears of the People," wrote one indignant South
Carolinian in 177 5, "Massacres and Instigated Insurrections, were words in
the mouth of every Child." And not only children: South Carolina's First
Provincial Congress voiced its own "dread of instigated insurrections."
North Carolinians, too, warned that "there is much reason to fear, in these
Times of general Tumult and Confusion, that the Slaves may be instigated,
encouraged by our inveterate Enemies to an Insurrection."
Were the British "instigating" rebellion? Or were they taking advantage
of African Americans' own determination to strike for freedom? As histo­
rian Sylvia Frey has pointed out, the incidence of flight, rebellion, or protest
among slaves increased significantly in the decade following the Stamp Act,
despite the long odds against success. In 1765 the Sons of Liberty paraded
around Charleston shouting "Liberty! Liberty and stamp'd paper!" Soon
after, slaves organized a demonstration of their own, chanting "Liberty!"
 Declaring Independence 93

Planter Henry Laurens believed the ruckus was merely a "thoughtless imita­
tion" of white colonials, but it frightened many South Carolinians.
With good reason. Look more closely at events in Virginia leading up to
Governor Dunmore's proclamation. Six months before Dunmore offered
freedom to all able-bodied slaves who would serve the king, he had con­
fiscated some of the colony's gunpowder to prevent the rebels from get­
ting it. At that point, "some Negroes . . . offered to join him and take up
arms." What was Dunmore's reaction? He ordered the slaves "to go about
their business" and "threatened them with his severest resentment, should
they presume to renew their application." Patriot forces, on the other hand,
accused Dunmore of seizing the gunpowder with the intention of "disarm­
ing the people, to weaken the means of opposing an insurrection of the
slaves." Hearing this charge, Dunmore became "exceedingly exasperated"
and threatened to "declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the City of Wil­
liamsburg to ashes."
In other words, the slaves, not Dunmore, made the first move in this
game of chess! And far from greeting the slaves' offer with delight, Dunmore
shunned it-until patriot fears
about black insurrections made Who was "instigating" rebellion-the
him consider the advantages that British or African American slaves?
black military support might
provide. Similarly, in 1773 and again in 1774 the loyal governor of Mas­
sachusetts, General Thomas Gage, received five separate petitions from "a
grate Number of [enslaved] Blacks" offering to fight for him if he would set
them free. "At present it is kept pretty quiet," Abigail Adams reassured her
husband, John, who was off at the First Continental Congress.
By 177 5 slave unrest was common in many areas of the Carolinas and
Georgia. Charleston had taken on "rather the appearance of a garrison
town," reported one observer, because the militia were patrolling the streets
at night as well as during the day, "to guard against any hostile attempts that
may be made by our domesticks." White fears were confirmed when a black
harbor pilot, Thomas Jeremiah, was arrested, tried, hanged, and burned to
death for plotting an insurrection that would enlist the help of the British
navy. Jeremiah told other blacks that "there was a great War coming soon"
that "was come to help the poor Negroes." According to James Madison, a
different group of slaves in Virginia "met together and chose a leader who
was to conduct them when the English troops should arrive." The con­
spiracy was discovered and suppressed. Islands along the coasts of South
Carolina and Georgia, as well as English navy ships, attracted slaves strik­
ing for freedom. The slaves were not "inticed," reported one captain; they
"came as freemen, and demanding protection." He could "have had near 500
who had offered."
The actions of these and other enslaved African Americans clearly
affected the conduct of both British officials and colonial rebels. The British,
who (like Dunmore) remained reluctant to encourage a full-scale rebellion,
94 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

nevertheless saw that the mere possibility of insurrection might be used as

an effective psychological threat. If South Carolinians did not stop oppos­
ing British policy, warned General Gage ominously, "it may happen that
your Rice and Indigo will be brought to market by negroes instead of white
People." For their part, southern white colonials worked energetically to
suppress both the rebellions and all news of them.As two Georgia delegates
to the Continental Congress informed John Adams, slave networks could
carry news "several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight." Madison saw
clearly the dangers of talking about the slave conspiracy in his state: "It is
prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed," he warned
a friend. Maryland's provisional government felt similarly about Governor
Dunmore's proclamation in neighboring Virginia. It immediately outlawed
all correspondence with the state, either by land or water. But word spread
anyway. "The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a
height," reported one Eastern Shore Marylander, "that we are under a
necessity of disarming them which we affected [sic] on Saturday last. We
took about eighty guns,some bayonets,swords,etc."
Thus the actions of African Americans helped push the delegates in Con­
gress toward their final decision for independence, even though the Decla­
ration remained largely silent on the subject. By striking for liberty, slaves
encouraged the British to use them as an element in their war against the
Americans.Lord North expected that British troops sent to Georgia and the
Carolinas in 177 5 would meet with success, especially because "we all know
the perilous situation ... [arising] from the great number of their negro
slaves,and the small proportion of white inhabitants."
The Americans were pushed toward independence by this knowledge.
Georgia delegates told John Adams that their slaves were eager to arise,and
if "one thousand regular [British] troops should land in Georgia, and their
commander ... proclaim freedom to all the negroes who would join his
campaign,twenty thousand would join it from [Georgia and South Carolina]
in a fortnight." James Madison, worrying about Lord Dunmore, warned
that a slave insurrection "is the only part in which this Colony is vulnerable;
& if we should be subdued,we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that
knows the secret." Washington,too,perceived the threat.Dunmore must be
crushed instantly,he warned in December 177 5, "otherwise,like a snowball,
in rolling, his army will get size." Although southern delegates wanted to
forbid black Americans from serving in the Continental Army, Washing­
ton changed his mind and supported the idea, having come to believe that
the outcome of the war might depend on "which side can arm the Negroes
the faster." Until recently, few historians have appreciated the role African
Americans played in shaping the context of independence.

Actions do speak louder than words-often enough. Still, the Declara­

tion's words and ideals have outlasted the sometimes contradictory actions
of its creators.Jefferson's entire life embodied those contradictions. More
than any president except Lincoln,Jefferson contributed to the downfall of
 Declaring Independence 95

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.

Masters whose slaves ran away commonly posted notices in newspapers offering
rewards for their rerurn. The advertisements often assumed that slaves had gone
to join kin. But these advertisements from an issue of the Virginia Gazette in
November 1775 indicate that slaveowners were frequently convinced that their
male slaves might have gone to offer service to Lord Dunmore or to the British
navy ("a Man of War's Man").

slavery. In addition to penning the Declaration's bold rhetoric, he pushed

for the antislavery provision in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which
served as a model for later efforts to stop slavery's expansion. Yet for all that,
he depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans throughout his
life. Although he apparently maintained a sexual relationship with one of his
slaves, Sally Hemings, upon his death he freed none, except five members of
the Hemings family. Sally was not among them.
It lay with Abraham Lincoln to express most eloquently the notion that a
document might transcend the contradictions of its creation. In 1857 Lin­
coln insisted that in proclaiming "all men are created equal," the founders
of the nation

did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoy­
ing that equality. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,
which should be f.uniliar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to,

constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly
96 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence,

and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors
everywhere.

"For the support of this Declaration," Jefferson concluded, "we mutually

pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." This
sentiment was no idle rhetoric. Many delegates took the final step toward
independence only with great reluctance. If the war was lost, they faced a
hangman's noose. Even in victory, more than a few signers discovered that
their fortunes had been devastated by the war. Yet it does no dishonor to
the principles of the Revolution to recognize the flawed nature of Jeffer­
son's attempt to reconcile slavery with liberty. Even less does it dishonor the
Revolution to appreciate the role enslaved African Americans played in forc­
ing the debates about independence. They, too, risked all in the actions­
declarations made without words-that so many of them took to avail them­
selves of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 Declaring Independence 97

Additional Reading

Carl Becker's venerable work, The Declaration ofIndependence: A Study in the

History of Political Ideas (New York, 1942) is still an engaging introduction.
Garry Wills provides wide-ranging contextual analysis of the document in
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).
Many states and local governments issued their own declarations, which have
been discussed in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration
ofIndependence (New York, 1997). Maier also examines how the Declaration
outgrew its position of relative obscurity during the half century following
the Revolution to become one of the "scriptural" texts of American history.
Sylvia Frey's fine Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
(Princeton, 1991) outlines the actions taken by African Americans during the
Revolutionary years. For the relation of African American rebellion and the
Declaration itself, see Sidney Kaplan, "The Domestic Insurrections of the
Declaration of Independence," Journal ofNegro History 61 (1976): 243-255.
CHAPTER 5

Material Witness

Do possesosi ns define us? The study of everyday objects reveals much

about the early republic-from small habits to the fandament:al
ways in which societ,y was being t:ransformed.

Here's a mute witness, like many to be encountered in this chapter. It

survives now in the collections of Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield,
Massachusetts. The Museum's best estimate is that the object was ham­
mered together around 1820, somewhere in New England. It measures
about 21 inches tall and 18 inches square. It would be seen around some,
though not all, American houses during this era. Any guesses as to its use?

98
 Material Witness 99

A crate, perhaps, for storage? If so, the material being stored would have
to be bulky or it would fall out the rather large spaces between the slatting.
A contraption for holding wood by the fireplace? Not particularly practical,
for the crate's shape would make it difficult to stack wood horizontally, and
almost as awkward to do so vertically. Furthermore, the amount of firewood
burned on a winter's day in New England would be far greater than what
this crate could hold.
Also, look closely at the object. About halfway down on the back side is
a horizontal piece of wood within the container that appears to be a small
ledge. What could that be for?
In fact, the goods being "stored'' in this container (for a container of sorts
it is) were much more valuable to the occupants of the house than any fire­
wood. Americans of the early nineteenth century would have recognized this
contraption as a "baby tender," or "standing stool," used by parents to help
toddlers stand but keep them from straying into mischief. The small ledge
allowed the child to sit and rest. Tenders with wheels were also available, but
the fancier versions actually possessed a certain disadvantage, because babies
using them could propel themselves across the floor. This feature posed
a significant danger in a house in which open fires for cooking or heating
were regularly kept going. The records of Henniker, New Hampshire, make
that clear. Between 1790 and 1830, seven children in that small town alone
were scalded to death in accidents involving hot water, soups and stews, or
hazards from similar housekeeping chores, such as boiling soap. Two other
Henniker youngsters died falling into the fireplace during the same time
period. And that total does not include lesser injuries, in which the children
survived.
The baby tender was only one among hundreds of objects that played an
intimate part in the everyday routines of Americans during the early repub­
lic, the period between the 1780s and the 1820s. A great many of those items
are foreign to us today, despite the fact that versions of some have survived
to the present. (foddlers still careen around in wheeled "walkers," occasion­
ally launching themselves into harm's way when parents forget to close gates
at the tops of stairs.) Like the changing context of the words examined in
100 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the previous chapter ("pursuit of happiness," for example), the context sur­
rounding material objects has shifted as well. If historians are to understand
the lives of past Americans both great and small, they need to breathe life
not only into the abstract sentiments of the Declaration, but also the con­
tours of the material environment-the stuff of everyday life.
Heat, one variable shaping those contours, is something we tend to take
for granted in a fully industrialized society. But keeping warm, particularly
during the harsh New England winters, shaped the material environment
in dozens of ways. Sarah Emery of Newburyport, Massachusetts, recalled
that in the cold winter of 1820-1821, "china cups cracked on the tea table
from the frost, before a rousing fire, the instant the hot tea touched them;
and plates set to drain in the process of dishwashing froze together in front
of the huge logs, ablaze in the wide
kitchen fireplace." Most homes Extremes ofheat and cold defined
in the early republic had only one many ofthe hazards ofhousehold
central fireplace, and the older the life in the early republic.
house, the larger and draftier it was
likely to be. Seventeenth-century fireplaces were 2 to 3 yards wide-large
enough to walk into-and their broad chimneys swept most of the heat
straight up out of the house. In such breezy conditions, seating benches like
the "kitchen settle" pictured here were designed to face the fire and shelter
those sitting in them from the drafts. (Notice that the high back extends all
the way to the floor to help keep the sitters' legs warm.)
If the main room was drafty despite the presence of a fire, other
rooms in the house were downright frigid. More than wind could whistle
 Material Witness 101

through the chinks of exterior walls and the cracks around windows. Abner
Sanger's diary for December 19, 1793, noted laconically that he used his
time "to clean out chambers [i.e., his rooms] of snow." Youngsters, who
often slept in garrets, were not surprised to find light drifts along the
floor and rime from their breath frosting the tops of their blankets. Some
folk moved their beds to the warmest room possible, in front of the main
fireplace-but then they had to worry about stray sparks setting fire to their
covers. Rooms abutting the chimney on the second floor or in the attic
gained some secondary warmth and could be used for storing foods such as
apples, squashes, onions, potatoes, carrots, and beets, all of which needed
to be protected from freezing. When the thermometer really plummeted,
however, "people's roots were frozen in the garret," as another diarist noted
in 1788. Digging into the ground provided more reliable food storage; a
"root cellar" penetrating deep enough beyond the frost line kept tempera­
tures above freezing.
For those who could afford them, curtains draped on four-poster beds
created a tent to conserve the warmer air generated by the bed's occupants.
And siblings as well as husbands and wives doubled up to benefit from the
shared body heat. Indeed, the practice was so common that sleeping alone
seemed a bit odd. One young apprentice recorded several times in his diary
the search for one or another nighttime companion: "I got Albert Field to
sleep with me last night, & I must go and get somebody to sleep with me
tonight for it is rather lonesome to lie alone." Many New Englanders also
"banked" their houses, protecting the root cellar and first story by piling up
insulation around the outside walls every autumn. They used leaves, tanbark,
cornstalks, sand, or even "chip-dung."
Baby tenders, root cellars, and bed curtains are all items of everyday life
that historians define as material culture. Those historians who make that
field their specialty realize how much the lives of Americans of this era were
constrained, day in, day out, by circumstances far different from today's world.
If it was a woman's task to spin wool, should she ask her husband or son to
move the "great wheel" into a heated room? (Julia Smith of Glastonbury,
Connecticut, did because she knew her fingers would not be nimble enough
otherwise.) What sorts of trees supplied the most useful firewood, and when
was the best time to lay in the year's supply? (For baking, coals from hickory
or birch served well; and the winter snow cover facilitated hauling logs from
the woodlot in a sleigh.)
Reconstructing the material culture of a people requires both hard work
and imagination. Some information can be gleaned by examining objects dis­
covered in attics or passed down by the descendants of those who first used
them. The baby tender pictured at the opening of this chapter arrived at
Memorial Hall Museum in 1960 with a tag identifying it as an "18th century
primitive baby tender used in Mrs. Sheldon Howe's family for many years."
But in examining the tender's 113 nails, the museum discovered that 100 of
them were a type known as "cut nails," not commonly in use until after 1820.
102 APTER THE FACT: THB ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Thus the tender was more likely constructed in the early nineteenth century,
which is only to say that the traditions handed down along with the objects
are not always accurate. Scholars of material culture use a wide variety of
written records and physical analysis to identify surviving objects and place
them in their broader context.
We have already encountered some sources of evidence. Reconstructing
the social world of Salem Village, historians drew upon household inventories
taken upon the death of the house's owner. Such inventories provide room­
by-room lists of the house's contents-not only major pieces of furniture, but
often minor objects as well, whose value might be only a few pennies. Such
inventories are not unfailingly reliable. When death was preceded by a long
illness, some possessions might have already been passed on to other relatives.
What else are we to make of a list including a fancy mirror and silver plates
but no beds? However, by sampling enough estates, patterns emerge.
The bed curtains just mentioned, for example, were expensive. Did that
limit their ownership solely to the rich? Historians have surveyed enough
inventories to suggest that by the 1770s at least half the households in some
towns used them. Although the cost may have been high, the warmth gained
on cold nights apparently justified the expense. Other documentary records
include family account books, which note daily expenses, extraordinary pur­
chases, and even the number of cords of wood burned over time. More arcane
records, such as fire insurance documents filed by prosperous homeowners,
yield details about how many fireplaces were used at different times of the
year. (Some rooms were shut up for the coldest months, it seems, because
they were too much trouble and expense to heat.) And of course, diaries sup­
ply wonderfully concrete descriptions of everyday lives.
Yet some details elude us, as in the case of the fired clay object shown
here, dated around 1820. Any guesses as to its function? We should note
immediately that its dimensions are too large to make it a cup for drinking.
It was delicately referred to as a "chamber pot," used in an era when "priv­
ies" (outhouses) were often constructed at some distance from the house
and inconvenient to reach, especially in the middle of the night or in winter.
Historian Jane Nylander, whose study of material culture has illuminated
 Material Witness 10 3

many of the previously noted strategies for keeping warm, confessed herself
at a loss for information when it came to chamber pots:

Chamber pots are listed in a few inventories, but they are conspicuously absent
from many others. Considering the frequency with which they are excavated
by historical archaeologists and the heavy reliance [by Americans of that day]
on cathartics as medical remedies, it seems likely that the care of these use­
ful vessels was an important daily chore. However, it is difficult to know the
conventions associated with their use.... Abner Sanger's diary gives us two
clues in this obscure area: on July 7, 1794, he purchased a "urine mug," and
on November 19, 1778, he made a "shit house." Perhaps that was really the
difference.

RooM FOR IMPROVEMENT

It would be understandable, of course, if Sanger's descendants were not
eager to hand down his chamber pot as an heirloom. Indeed, the wonder
is that so many chamber pots-and other objects-survived the winnowing
process that death inevitably brings. If you were to die suddenly, how many
of your possessions would be saved and passed along? Valued photographs
or letters, perhaps-but that old computer, whose processor is nearly worth­
less, with its dial-up modem? The kitchen dish towels or the plastic Poca­
hontas tumbler from McDonald's, which somehow survived a purging? A lot
of your own material culture would likely disappear into the landfill, simply
because the remnants are old and worn or their personal significance is lost
on others.
Yet material objects that have disappeared in real life often survive in
paintings or photographs, which become visual archives for historians. A
variety of material culture from the early republic can be seen in the paint­
ings of John Lewis Krimmel, for example. Krimmel, a German immigrant
who came to Philadelphia, was one of America's earliest painters of "genre
scenes"-paintings of ordinary life rather than formal portraits of the well­
to-do or grand paintings of historic events. Krimmel recorded bustling
parades and election-day crowds; indoors he painted weddings and tavern
scenes. Quilting Frolic, shown on the following page, depicts the end of a
day on which a number of women have been working on the quilt at left.
A woman is cutting it free from its frame just as several other folk arrive to
celebrate the project's completion. There will likely be some dancing, since
a black fiddler is there to provide the music.
The room is filled with a veritable treasure trove of material culture. In
examining the painting, we intend to follow the method of many preachers
of the era, which was to present a text out of scripture and then "improve"
(or elaborate on) its verses one by one. But before beginning, it may be use­
ful for readers to try "improving" the painting themselves. Take a pencil
and paper and jot down half a dozen items of material culture displayed in
104 AFn:K THE FACT: THE AR.T OF HISTOBICAL DETECTION

Quilti.ng Frolic. Then consider how each might be used to illuminate the
lives of the people pictured.
The likeliest place to begin is with the quilt itself, for quilting conjures up
picturesque images of the young republic's simpler days. Sewing was wom­
en's work that young girls learned ahnost as soon as they could hold a nee­
dle. Harriet Kidder of Newark, New Jersey, recorded proudly in her diary
that daughter Katy "has nearly completed her quilt .... She has pieced every
block-put them all together in long strips & assisted in sewing together
these strips." A month later the Kidders celebrated that completion with a
party, for it was Katy's fifth birthday.The age of five was a common marker
of when a child might complete a quilt-at least when this particular diary
was written, in 1847.
But the date is important, for by 1847 we are already well into the mid­
nineteenth century, and it is a nostalgic misconception to envision quilt­
ing as an integral part of life during
A patchwork quilt was not so much the colonial period, or even in 1820.
a sign ofold-fashioned habits as it Today, recycling is a virtue; we
was the coming ofthe lnd'USl:rial imagine stitching together a patch­
Revolution. work blanket as a thrifty way to reuse
old scraps of cloth. Yet before the
1820s, such quilting would have struck most Americans as a sign of abun­
dance, for it required patterned cloth, and such cloth was an imported luxury
throughout nearly all of the eighteenth century.Most clothing was made of
 Material Witnm 105

simple homespun. Paradoxically, the "rustic" practice of quilting was a by­

product of the Industrial Revolution, which made low-cost patterned textiles
readily available.
During the early years of the republic, quilts were simpler affairs, not made
up of multiple pieces of cloth or decorative materials appliqued to the cloth.
A diary that mentioned a quilt in 1780 was more likely referring to a woman's
petticoat, which was finished with the characteristic crisscross stitch. The
example shown here, from the later eighteenth century, was bright red and
finished off with an elegant leaf-and-flower design that could have peeked
through the fashionable open-front skirts of gowns of the period.
As for quilting a blanket, that was done by joining two large pieces of
cloth that enclosed an insulating padding of carded wool or tow (fibers made
from flax); the three layers were kept together by the crisscross stitch. The
display side of the blanket was usually made of calamanco, a lustrous worsted
wool, while the hidden side was a simpler homespun. In KrimmePs scene,
painted around 1813, the quilt appears to be of a single color and not made
of piecework.
The social nature of the quilting frolic, however, was characteristic of
both the colonial period and the nineteenth century. When work was ardu­
ous or lonely, especially in sparsely populated rural areas, Americans looked
for ways to enjoy each other's company. New Englanders called the prac­
tice "changing work:s"-that is, one person helped another who would later
return the favor in an exchange of work. We "spun and sang songs," recorded
Ruth Henshaw in her diary in 1789, when her friend Sally came by for two
days. When such get-togethers involved more people and ended with a cel­
ebration, they were called "frolics," and completing a quilt was only one of
many excuses for sociability. Esther Cooper, living on Long Island in the
1760s and 1770s, recorded going to "spinning frolics" on several occasions;
her husband Simon proposed a wood-chopping frolic, for which the women
"were very busie cooking for the work men."
106 AFTER THE FACT: THE AB.T OF HisTORICAL DETECTION

Quilting was by no means the only occupation that went on in rooms like
this one. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich tallied the references to work in
the diary of Betty Foot, a Connecticut girl, from January through May 1775:

Spinning appeared on twenty-three days, knitting on twenty-three, sewing fif­

teen, carding [wool] thirteen, and a cluster of other activities-quilting, hatch­
eting [separating flax fibers], spooling and quilling-on five. Betty mentioned
her own weaving only once, on March 7, 1775, when "I stay'd at home &
finish'd Molly's Worsted Stockings and fix'd two Gowns for Welch's Girls
which came to ls 6d [1 shilling, sixpence] and I wove while Nabby went to
Milking." Her fifteen sewing entries included nine occasions on which she
"fix'd" gowns for other people.

KrimmePs painting itself suggests the variety of activii t es. The woman
kneeling on the ground has her left arm resting on a sewing basket, and in
the lower foreground at least two other similar workbaskets can be seen.
Turning to another set of objects, look at the cups and saucers on the tray
carried by the young black servant (see the detail from the painting above),
and the plates and napkins on the
The ferryman�family ate fish out tablecloth to the left. To modem eyes
ofa single din:y, deep, wooden dish, such objects seem unexceptional, yet
"cramming down skins, scales, and they reveal much, particularly when
we consider change over time. Dur­
all" with their bare hands.
ing the eighteenth century, dining
habits in the colonies were often primitive, especially in rural areas and among
poorer folk. One physician traveling in 17 44 wrote about being offered a
meal by a ferryman along the Susquehanna River

whom I found att vittles with his wife and family upon a homely dish of fish
without any kind of sauce. They desired me to eat but I told them I had no
stomach. They had no cloth upon the table, and their mess [i.e., food] was in
a dirty, deep, wooden dish which they evacuated with their hands, cramming
 Mllterial Wttness 107

down skins, scales, and all. They used neither knife, fork, spoon, plate, or nap­
kin because, I suppose, they had none to use.

Even in the late eighteenth century, dining could be primitive. At breakfast

"my father and mother would eat out of one bason, myself and two sisters,
out of the other," recalled Seth Sprague of Duxbury, Massachusetts. John
Weeks of Salisbury, Vermont, remembered "the custom of setting the large
six-quart dish in the centre of the table, while half a dozen or more children
stood around it, each with a spoon, partaking of this homely but healthful
repast of samp and milk." Samp, a Narragansett Indian term for cornmeal
mush, was only one of many stews, soups, puddings, and porridges common
at the time. Such fare was eaten easily enough out of an all-purpose dish
known as a "porringer," a bowl that could be used to drink out of or to hold
a semiliquid meal eaten with a spoon. Early porringers were often earth­
enware, like the one pictured here, imported from England around 1690.
After 17 SO, however, pewter and silver models became more common. In his
autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recalled that his wife presented him with
new dining ware, because she thought "her husband deserv'd a silver spoon
and China bowl as well as any of his neighbors. This was the first appearance
,,
of [silver] plate and China in our house.

Given the dining habits prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth

century, Krirnmel's portrayal of proper china cups and plates and napkins
suggests that his Philadelphia frolickers prided themselves on their civilized
fare. The tablecloth, too, is a mark of refinement. If you look closely you can
see the fashionable fringe at its edges; by this date many American weavers
were adding fringe to their homemade linen cloths. The painting is not
detailed enough to show whether silverware is present. Although it almost
certainly would have been used, we have no way of knowing whether the
guests considered themselves polite enough to convey food to their mouths
by using a fork rather than a knife, in the manner of the French and English.
One manual of etiquette from the 1830s advised, "if you think as I do that
Americans have as good a right to their own fashions •you may choose the
. .

convenience of feeding yourself with your right hand armed with a [knife's]
steel blade; and provided you do it neatly and do not put in large mouthfuls,
or close your lips tight over the blade, you ought not to be considered as
eating ungenteely."
108 AF:r:im THE FACT: THE Arr OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Another mark of refined dining, significant in its own right, is the cup­
board at the left of Krimmel's painting. It displays china through its win­
dows, so guests can admire the household's prosperity and good taste. The
doors were unusual for 1813 in that they slid sideways rather than swinging
out on hinges, an advantage in crowded quarters. Cupboards played a crucial
role as a repository for family valuables-particularly valuables belonging to
women. Like other possessions, cupboards themselves could be passed along
in the family and treasured for their own sake.
One such heirloom, astonishing in its beauty, is the cupboard shown here
belonging originally to Hannah Barnard of Hadley, Massachusetts. Made
sometime in the decade after 1710, its design reflected a local tradition among
cabinetmakers in the Connecticut River region around Springfield. Cabinet­
makers there both carved and painted designs on the wood, including the
bright blue turned columns on the upper half of the Barnard cupboard. About
250 examples of these "Hadley chests" or similar items, created between
1680 and 1740, have survived. To have the owner's name painted in large let­
ters was unusual, but out of 126 similar chests, at least 115 incorporated the
owner's initials into the design. Other characteristic motifs include the two­
petaled tulips joined to a single large leaf (seen to the inside of the letters of
Hannah Barnard's name), the inverted hearts and diamonds below the tulips,
the semicircles, and the twining vines flanking each side of the drawers.
 Material Witness 109

In addition, the Hadley chests exhibit a revealing naming pattern.Barnard

was Hannah's maiden name, though the chest was very probably made in
anticipation of her marriage.Similarly, the great majority of initials displayed
on other Hadley chests corresponded with maiden names, and only 6 bore
the initials of both the wife and husband. In other words, the cabinets were
associated with the woman of the household far more than with the man.
As Laurel Ulrich has noted, the reason seems to be that such cabinets held
goods that women traditionally owned-linens, damask napkins, embroi­
dered samplers-passed down through the female line of a family, mother
to daughter. We have already seen, in discussing the status of women dur­
ing the colonial period, that the law treated men and women differently.
That was the case in terms of inheritance. Traditionally "real" property­
woodlands, fields, houses, barns, and other real estate-passed from one male
to another.Because such property was not moveable, it could not travel from
place to place.
By contrast, when a woman married, she moved from her own family to
the home of her husband and took his name.Her possessions tended to be what
the law referred to as "moveables"­
property that could travel with her, A woman� possessions tended to be
including domestic animals and per­ "moveables, "property that could
sonal possessions such as a cupboard travel with her when she married.
and its contents.As Ulrich observed,
this division of property was not neutral. "In such a system, women them­
selves became 'movables,' changing their names and presumably their iden­
tities as they moved from one male-headed household to another." In 1813,
when Krimmel painted Quilting Frolic, Hannah Barnard's cupboard was still
being used by her descendants, a century after its manufacture. It left the
family only when Hannah's great-granddaughter, Hannah Barnard Hastings
Kellogg, was forced to part with it upon making the long trek to California.
In an age of increasing mobility, even "moveables" had their limits.
Notice the broom lying on the floor at the lower right of Quilting Frolic.
This broom is an advance over the coarser versions used in most homes in
the 1780s.Older twig brooms could only banish leaves or clots of mud and
dirt, leaving finer dust behind. Given those limitations, a careful housewife
camouflaged the remaining dust by scattering a bit of clean white sand on
the floor and brushing it into a pleasing herringbone pattern. "A white floor
sprinkled with clean white sand ...decorated a parlour genteely enough for
any body," recalled one woman who grew up in Philadelphia near the turn of
the century.Around 1800, however, some farmers began using the thinner
stalks of sorghum grass (which came to be called "broomcorn") to manufac­
ture a broom that swept up finer dust as well.This seems to be the variety
used by Krimmel's quilters.By the 1830s millions had been sold.
In the right-hand corner ofKrimmel's room stands a tall case clock, about
6 feet high-another reflection of the owner's good taste.In the first years of
the republic, such a clock could be afforded only by the reasonably well-to­
do.American clockmakers worked by hand, producing no more than about
110 .AF:r:u. THE FACT: THE Arr OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

ten "movements" per year. The purchaser was expected to find a cabinet­
maker to build a case for the movement. By 1813 Eli Terry and other manu­
facturers had devised ways to turn out over a thousand movements a year,
also significantly smaller and capable of fitting in cases only 20 inches high.
The new clocks were cheaper, too. Over the next decades they would be
hawked far and wide by Yankee peddlers to Americans eager to add a bit of
refinement to houses and even rude cabins.
As material culture, such clocks provided an ambiguous message about the
world their owners occupied. The clock in Krimmel's painting was a mark of
gentility as much or more than it was a precise timepiece. To be sure, urban
Americans had some use for dividing the day into hours and minutes. Yet nat­
ural rhythms of light and dark often provided equally practical divisions of the
day. Farmers knew quite well how far along the day had come merely by look­
ing out a window, and often they made fine distinctions. One Illinois farmer in
the 1830s divided the hours before sunrise into no less than eight stages: long
before day, just before day, just coming day, just about daylight, good light,
before sunup, about sunup, and (finally) sunup. The faces of many clockworks
reflected this affinity to the natural world; the one shown here gives not only
 Material Witness 111

the time but, above the clock face, a calculation of the moon's current phase.
It was useful to know when a full moon was available, to provide better light
for traveling or working at night. At the same time, the penetration of clocks
into ordinary homes reflected an increased need to appear punctually either
at work or at social events. A Massachusetts diarist in 1830 recorded having a
fine time at a sleighing party: "They sing, going and returning, which sounds
very prettily. Have some hot coffee, and return at half past nine." Krimmel's
clock, then, was a part of the material environment that looked both backward
to the genteel culture of the late eighteenth century and forward to an indus­
trial era in which the hours of the day were more strictly regimented.

THE REFINING OF AMERICA

Thus far we have been dealing with material culture on a piecemeal basis­
object by object, looking to tease out how each item shaped everyday life.
But the case clock reminds us that with the passage of time, material culture
is constantly changing. Quilting, we saw, meant something different in 1840
than it did in 1780. If material culture is constantly evolving, then a study of
it may help chart the broader evolution of American society as well.
What longer-term trends are revealed by the objects in Quilting Frolic?
Return to the painting's plates and napkins, and recall the physician's account
of dinner with the ferryman's family, written some seventy-five years earlier.
Contrasting the two ways of dining suggests that over time, more refined
habits were coming into play. Yet that evolution is not a simple progression
from the "barbarities" of 1744 to the "civilized" behavior of 1813. Some
people in 17 44 (including that disgusted physician) felt it uncouth to eat
without silverware or napkins-and those folk, obviously, came from the
higher ranks of society.
The spread of refinement, therefore, involved the diffusion of habits first
practiced by social elites downward to Americans in the middle of the social
spectrum-to a middle class that was itself becoming a distinctive part of
American society during those years. Historian Richard Bushman has traced
this process over several hundred years. The changes were gradual and
usually appeared first in urban areas, where new cultural influences spread
more easily. They appeared also where industrialization took hold earlier, in
New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, rather than in the South and the
West-though those regions showed signs of change as well.
Genteel behavior was modeled after the manners of kings, queens, and
the nobility. Over the centuries, guides were published, known as "courtesy
books," that instructed in the intricacies of proper conduct. Rules of Civil­
ity, a French publication of 1671 (also used in Britain), explained that those
men and women with the highest social rank assumed the greatest places of
honor, whether in a room (the space farthest from the door) or in a carriage
(the back right seat) or in a bedroom (the bed itself ). Behaviors of the small­
est sort came under regulation: a servant of inferior rank was never to knock
at the door of a nobleman-only to scratch! Such rules were extreme for
112 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

eighteenth-century America, but George Washington as a young man cop­

ied maxims out of a similar courtesy book: "In Company of those of Higher
Quality than yourself Speak not ti[ll] you are ask'd a Question then Stand
upright put of[f ] your Hat and Answer in few words."
As these formulas made clear, genteel manners specified the proper rela­
tion to material objects such as doors, carriage seats, and beds. Hats were
doffed to show respect-not only in
"Refined" manners specified even Washington's day but in Krimmel's;
the proper relation to objects such note the guest in Quilting Frolic who
as doors, carriage seats, and beds. is tipping his hat courteously. We
have also seen how china, tablecloths,
and clocks all served as markers of civility. One item missing in this array is
a carpet-not surprising, for in 1813 such adornments were still relatively
rare. In 1770 most Americans would have found it odd indeed to cover a
room's wide plank flooring. Rug usually referred to a bed blanket, also called
a "coverlid."
To modern eyes, a carpet would seem hardly to merit mention as an
object toward which proper behavior must be paid. But in 1813 (and earlier)
there were good reasons for not using carpets. Walking any distance out of
doors coated shoes with mud or dirt that could easily deface fine rugs. Over
time, dirt became less an issue in cities with paved or cobblestone streets and
sidewalks. In 1824 novelist Lydia Sigourney wrote a story based in part on
a real experience, about a farmer mystified to see a rug on the parlor floor.
Trying his level best to avoid getting it dirty, he worked his way around the
edge of the room until blocked by a table. "I must tread on the kiverlid,"
he apologized; and when told that the carpet was meant to be walked on,
replied, "I ha'nt been used to seeing kiverlids spread on the floor to walk on.
We are glad to get 'em to kiver us up a' nights."
The trend toward refinement included more than the spread of genteel
objects, for such ornaments were displayed within a larger setting. Thus we
must examine not just the objects themselves but the space enclosing them, for
space, too, was undergoing a steady evolution within the American home.
The earliest houses in British America were quite basic. Perhaps a third
to a half or even more built during the seventeenth century featured a door
that opened directly into the main room, known since medieval days as the
"hall." Against one wall of this hall stood the large, drafty fireplace, which
doubled as a kitchen area. Later in the century, houses were more likely to
have two rooms on the first floor and another two on the second. On the
first floor the additional room was known as the "parlor," but in effect it
was the "best bedroom," where the mother and father slept and in which
the most valuable furniture was kept, such as beds and dressers. Additional
sleeping and storage space on the second floor was usually accessible by
either a ladder or a stairway, the latter walled off to keep the heat in the main
room from escaping upward. Windows were only about 2 feet square, also to
keep heat in, which guaranteed dark and gloomy surroundings. Glass panes
 Material Witness 113

were preferred, but more than a few houses made do with oilcloth, which let
through even less light.
Ordinary folk continued to use such houses during the eighteenth century,
but those who could afford them increasingly built more spacious Georgian
brick homes, which were coming into fashion in Britain. The main door no
longer opened directly onto the central room, but onto an elegant hallway
and staircase. No longer walled off and hidden, these stairs became part of
the welcoming entryway. The main hall, which before had been a multi­
functional space for eating, cooking, and sleeping, became more formal and
finished, sometimes known as the "entertaining room." Walls were plas­
tered and painted or wallpapered, instead of showing wood planking. The
ceiling was finished, too, no longer revealing the rafters and flooring of the
room above. Corner moldings added refinement, and chair rails-molding
at waist height-protected walls from being scratched by the elegant seats
placed along a room's perimeter. More light brightened the rooms: sash
windows ("the newest fashion" in 1710) allowed in more daylight than the
old-fashioned casements, and the eighteenth-century gentry took advantage
of the new cleaner-burning (though more expensive) spermaceti candles to
light their homes in the evening.
Improvements in heating also reshaped rooms toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Benjamin Thomas, a Massachusetts man also known
as Count Rumford, redesigned the traditional fireplace to make it smaller,
less drafty, and more efficient. Benjamin Franklin's stove, inserted into a
fireplace, also allowed more heat to radiate into the room. The smaller fire­
places were less convenient for cooking, but since the new houses had more
space, the kitchen could be moved to a separate room at the back of the
house, to the cellar, or, especially in the southern colonies, to an outbuilding
behind the main house. (Krimmel's room features a smaller fireplace.)
Comfort was part of the rationale behind the changes. But they were not
merely about practicality. The newer architecture reflected the leisure that
colonial elites enjoyed. (The traditional definition of a gentleman was that
he did not need to work to support himself or his family.) The more money
spent on furnishing the parlor-the most expensive room in the house-the
less the parlor was involved with practical, everyday economic activities such
as eating, spinning, cooking, or sleeping. Estate inventories tell the tale. As
the eighteenth century progressed, fewer and fewer large houses listed beds
located in the parlor room. Instead we find tea tables, chairs, and cupboards
displaying the best china. And entertainment in the finest houses was not
confined to the parlor; second-floor rooms might be outfitted for tea or
even fine dining. That was one reason the open staircase and central hallway
were so important. "The staircase must present itself boldly and freely to the
sight," advised one British architectural authority, "otherwise all has a con­
fused and poor aspect. It looks as if the house had no good upper floor." His­
torian William Thomas O'Dea has pointed out that the increase of candles
used in sconces and candelabra was not "the result of utilitarian pressures for
114 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

better lighting, but of the evolution of a way of life whose chief objects were
entertainment and display."
Display indeed. Both O'Dea and Bushman have emphasized the theat­
rical quality of the newer architecture. Colonial elites saw themselves as
leaders of their communities, and they felt obliged to present their lead­
ership in highly visible ways. George Washington was painfully aware of
being watched at all times, as the maxims he copied from his courtesy book
demonstrated: "In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a hum­
ming Noise, nor Drum with your fingers and Feet." Washington's visibility
was peculiarly high, but all gentlefolk recognized that "in the Presence of
Others," they must behave to a standard. "Wherever you are, imagine that
you are observed," insisted a popular eighteenth-century ladies' handbook,
"and that your Behaviour is attentively scanned by the rest of the Company
all the while; and this will oblige you to observe yourself, and to be con­
stantly on your Guard."
Given such attitudes, the houses of the elite were designed to display the
elite and their possessions advantageously. Visitors traveled a path, which
was often landscaped, toward an imposing mansion whose exterior walls
were painted or constructed of brick, in marked contrast to most weather­
beaten, unpainted houses. Ushered through a formal garden or courtyard,
guests entered an impressive hallway and were led into rooms aglow with
as many as a dozen candles, whose light was multiplied and reflected back
by the silver plate, candlesticks, and trays. Mirrors on the wall and polished
chairs and tables further magnified space and light. The activities that went
on within these rooms were not so different from those enjoyed by ordi­
nary folk-card playing, tea drinking, and dancing. It was the refinement
that made the difference. The objects, the spaces, and the vistas all ennobled
those who took their place on these stages.

THE MATERIAL IDENTITIES

OF A MIDDLE CLASS
During the early republic, the tastes of gentlemen and gentlewomen were
increasingly adopted by Americans with less income and status. The pro­
cess of refinement helped create a distinctive middle class, defined in part
by the increase in urban living and in part by the habits of life its members
adopted and the sorts of objects with which they surrounded themselves. Yet
as Richard Bushman pointed out, the process was not merely one of imita­
tion. Refinement itself was evolving because of who these middling sorts were
and how their lives required them to live.
Unlike gentlemen, members of the middle classes were obliged to work.
Tableware, china, carpets, and clocks were eagerly purchased, but they did
not come cheap. Where would the money be found to buy them? The
census of 1810 provided one revealing answer, for it collected informa­
tion on Americans' occupations and work habits. Both farm families and
 Material Witness 115

urban residents earned extra income through household manufacturing,

producing textiles like the fringed tablecloth in Krimmel's painting or the
new sorghum-grass brooms. Tench Coxe, who created a digest of the 1810
census, noted that cloth manufactured on home-based looms contributed
"to the comfort and happiness" of the women who manufactured it and left
men free "for the duties of the farm." With southern plantations produc­
ing ever more cotton since the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney's cotton
gin, Coxe hoped that home manufacturing might increase and in the pro­
cess "render every industrious female an artizan, whenever her household
duties do not require her time."
Thus the quilting frame so prominent in Krimmel's painting was actually
a sign of the conflicting forces of leisure and work. On the one hand, the
room exhibited many signs of refine­
ment and a desire to rise above the The spaces in a gentleman� house
older, simpler ways of life. Yet work, focused on a display of wealth and
not leisure, provided the rationale status; the new middle-class homes
for the frolic, no matter how much were refuges that valued privacy.
fun was to be had. Nearly 90 percent
of the households in Topsham, Maine-to take one example-were making
cloth of some sort. Over half of these households had looms, and the cloth
making went on in families whose male heads were tanners, shipwrights,
joiners, and blacksmiths, among others. Even a few men whom the census
takers styled "gentlemen" found it profitable to manufacture clothing.
How the cloth was used varied from one house to the next. Some was
created only for the family's shirts, dresses, and trousers. Other households
were more ambitious. "My mother would change [i.e., exchange] work with
Zerniah's mother and other women, knitting and sewing for them while
they would weave cotton and flax into cloth which we would get dressed into
fustian [a strong fabric] at the mill for the boys and also for Father's sum­
mer working dress," recalled Mary Palmer Tyler. From this entry alone, it
becomes clear that cloth making involved a patchwork of relationships, with
the exchange of work between families and friends going on as of old-but
now also with the presence of a "mill." In the early 1800s more and more
mills were dotting the New England countryside. The census of 1810 listed
over 600 carding mills, where wire-brush machines combed out wool or
flax in preparation for spinning. Over 110 cotton-spinning factories sold
thread to women who could weave it into cloth in their own homes. The
women would then sell the cloth back to the factories. Thus home industry
at first complemented the new factories, and the parlors of the middle class
remained places where work mixed with leisure, and where spinning wheels
and even looms crowded other furniture.
But with the coming of larger-scale factories like the Lowell mills, estab­
lished in 1820, cheaper cloth could be turned out in quantity, making it more
difficult for home manufacturers to compete. The decades following 1830
saw the separation of the workplace and the home into increasingly distinct
spheres. The daughters of farmers began to take jobs in factories, rather than
116 AmR THE FACT: THE Arr OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

"

staying home to help mothers make cloth to be sold at market. As one New
England minister noted, "The transition from mother-and-daughter power
to water-and-steam power" produced "a complete revolution of domestic
life.'' For middle-class families the home was becoming less a workplace and
more a refuge from the workaday world beyond. Women were the moral
guardians of this domestic domain, and working men retreated to it after the
day's labor, expecting comfort and repose. By the mid-nineteenth century
the "cult of domesticity," as historians have come to call it, was in full swing.
Historians can plot the material contours of these changes in the histories
of individual houses, as they were remodeled and improved over the years.
When Old Sturbridge Village moved the home of blacksmith Emerson
Bixby from Barre, Massachusetts, to its museum grounds, it carefully stud­
ied Bixby's account books, the alterations of the house walls, and the layers
of paint and wallpaper in order to document the process of refinement over
time. In 1807 the dwelling was still primitive. Its somewhat uncharacteristic
three-room configuration had a kitchen in the rear, with a parlor and sitting
room in front. The parlor, also known as the "best room" (br on the plan)
included a bed where the previous owners had slept. Although the front
door opened directly onto that room, at least it could boast wallpaper on the
upper half of the walls, as well as chair rails and wainscoting (a wood panel­
ing) on the lower half, painted Prussian blue. Yet despite those refinements,
the owners not only slept in the best room but ate there as well. The kitchen
stairway was enclosed, following the old style, and a central chimney served
the fireplace in each room. A small pantry was used for storage. In short,
although a few eighteenth-century refinements had been introduced into
the parlor, the house in 1807 functioned as had most simple seventeenth­
century houses.
 Material Witness 117

By the time Bixby finished a series of renovations around 184 5, the size of
the house and the functions of its rooms had changed (see the enlarged floor
plan). A few features remained as they were. There was no easy way to add a
central stairway and a front entry hall, so access to the second floor remained
through the kitchen. But the best room had become a full-fledged parlor;
the door to the outside had been removed and was replaced by a window. A
room (nr) was added on the first floor for Mr. and .Mrs. Bixby, which allowed
their bed to be moved from the parlor. And the interior walls were plastered
throughout, and all the rooms were either wallpapered or painted a fashion­
able gray.
The exterior received attention as well. Bixby had the unpainted siding
removed and new clapboard installed and painted white, a color that had
come into fashion by the mid-1800s.
(Eighteenth-centuryowners preferred 'When a refined home came to
a yellow or sand, or even russet or incluae a pleasingfront lawn,
green, if brick was not used.) Also, the residents stopped thr<rWing their
notion of a front lawn as an aesthetic garbage out the windows.
element of a refined home came into
play. We know this because archaeologists from Old Sturbridge excavated
around the original site of the house. In the layers of the soil deposited before
the 1840s, a good deal of refuse can be found: broken plates, ashes, and food
scraps. Such garbage was simply thrown out through a convenient window,
indicating no concern for the house's external appearance. After the 1840s,
however, garbage was usually collected in designated spots at the rear.
We do not know for sure, but it would have made sense for the Bixbys
to have added a fence around the yard, as many middle-class homes were
doing. Contemporary architects were also recommending that shrubbery be
118 AFTER THE FACT: Tm Ai.tT OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

used to decorate the house and soften its appearance. The contrast with the
more open display of eighteenth-century mansions is instructive: these new
middle-class houses, envisioned as refuges, preferred to appear sheltered
from the public bustle.
Given these changes in the home environment, look at one final engrav­
ing of a parlor, this one done about fifteen years after Quilting Frolic. Having
analyzed the objects seen in Krimmel's painting, take a moment to catalog
the material culture shown here. What differences do you notice, and how
would you relate them to the social transformations under way?
In terms of objects, a number of items jump out. First, a pair related to
size: the fireplace and the window. The former is much smaller and the lat­
ter much larger than would have been seen a century earlier. A close look
at the fire in the grate reveals that the flames are no longer fueled by wood
but instead coal, which was increasingly used by urban residents. There is
a carpet on the floor, which is conspicuously absent from Quilting Frolic.
Other objects worth commenting on-we leave you the opportunity for a
little research and speculation-are the clock over the mantel, the globe, the
draperies, the footstools, the lamp in the window, and the vase in the right
foreground.
Perhaps an even more interesting question revolves around the objects we
do not see in the engraving. An inspector from Scotland Yard once famously
inquired of Sherlock Holmes whether there was any clue crucial to deter­
mining the whereabouts of a missing racehorse. Attention must be paid to
"the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime," Holmes replied. "The
dog did nothing in the nighttime," protested the inspector. "That was the
 Material Witness 11 9

curious incident!" replied Holmes. In Quilting Frolic we see a plethora of

objects related to the work activities of the people in the parlor: sewing bas­
kets, a broom, a quilting frame, a grinder of some sort on the stool. These
are nowhere to be seen in the engraving from 1831. Work has been banished
from the parlor. Furthermore, there is no cupboard full of dishes. Why not?
What has replaced it?
Equally telling are the people in the engraving. Krimmel documents a
boisterous social occasion, with thirteen people in the room. Here we see
only three figures in an intimate family setting. The artist, whose engraving
was titled There Is No School Like the Family School, clearly portrays a moral
lesson about what should go on at home. We see now a nuclear family rather
than extended one: only a father, mother, and daughter. In Krimmel's paint­
ing, by contrast, a grandfather sits by the fire and perhaps three siblings are
evident, as well as their mother, seated to the left of the fireplace. As the
young republic became more urban and less agricultural, the average family
size began to drop. On a farm, a large family made good economic sense,
since boys could help fathers in the field, and daughters could assist moth­
ers in sewing, spinning, weaving, and doing household chores. The growing
urban middle class, on the other hand, recognized that an education was
paramount to securing a good job and a comfortable home; and education
was more expensive to provide for large families.
Finally, compare the notion of refinement revealed in the engraving of a
middle-class family with the sort of refinement reflected in eighteenth-century
architecture. For the well-to-do of the late eighteenth century, rooms made
it possible for one to see and be seen in a public way, as the leaders of society.
This notion of leadership could not extend to members of the much larger
middle class of the 1830s. So while more folk enjoyed many of the consumer
goods that had been available only to the upper classes fifty years earlier, the
focus of that enjoyment was turned inward. Calvert Vaux, a leading architect
of the 1850s, spoke for changing tastes when he referred to the parlor as "the
general living-room of the family" that functioned quite differently from the
traditional genteel parlor. The genteel parlor was kept immaculate, its door
tightly shut,

always ready for-what? For daily use? Oh, no; it is in every way too good for
that. For weekly use? No, not even for that-but for company use; and thus
the choice room, with the pretty view, is sacrificed, to keep up a conventional
show of finery that pleases no one.... All this is absurd. No room in any
house, except, perhaps, in a very large mansion, ought to be set apart for com­
pany use only ... certainly not the most agreeably situated apartment in the
house, which should be enjoyed daily.

Over time, Vaux's notion of a house centered on family activities gained

in one home after another. That was certainly the case with Emerson Bixby.
Virtually every existing house in his neighborhood had been remodeled in
one way or another by the time his renovations got under way. Bixby was, in
fact, a classic example of a fellow "keeping up with the Joneses."
12 0 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

DEFINING OURSELVES
In the end, the study of material culture insinuates itself into the smallest
crannies of everyday life, as historians and archaeologists examine faded por­
ringers, chip the paint off moldings, and grub about in the dirt to recon­
struct even the garbage of a household. Yet material culture can lead as well
to larger questions about our collective identities. There is an old German
adage with an aggressively materialist bent: Mann ist was Mann iBt (one is
what one eats). If we broaden the saying, there is much to be said for the
notion that people construct their identities-that they become what they
are-by the way they make use of the things all around them. The "mid­
dling sorts" of people in the early republic incorporated eighteenth-century
notions of what gentlefolk ought to own and how they ought to behave. Yet
their own notions of refinement took on a different form, in which refuge
from work became more important than the social display of the eighteenth­
century gentry.
Material culture thus helps us trace the young republic's first steps away
from an agrarian society toward an urban and industrial nation. This story
has been often told, but usually by focusing on the rise of factories like the
Lowell mills, as they turned out products on a large scale. The shorthand we
use to name this transformation is, of course, the Industrial Revolution.
Yet by focusing on the material interactions of ordinary folk, the per­
spective shifts. Industrial America was only in its infancy during the early
republic. The first factories had not yet displaced the work that was going
on at home. While Emerson Bixby worked as a blacksmith in Barre, his wife
Laura and her three daughters helped pay for their renovations by braid­
ing straw for hats, as well as sewing shoe uppers that could be sold to shoe
manufacturers. At the same time, they received income from the sale of the
farm's cheese and butter.
In other words, even before factories came to dominate the American
economy, ordinary folk were working harder in a host of different ways
to earn additional income to buy
Historians speak ofan "industrious goods that would refine their lives,
revolution," in which people began give them more comfort, and allow
to work harder to earn money to them to enjoy some of the luxuries
buy consumer goods. that the gentry possessed. Swap an
old clay porringer for finer china,
insisted Franklin's wife. Historians have begun to recognize the importance
of this transformation, referring to a "consumer revolution" in eighteenth­
century Britain and in America. To use the economists' metaphor of supply
and demand, instead of talking about an industrial revolution that begins
to supply a host of new goods to buyers, historians speak increasingly of an
"industrious revolution" that began earlier in the eighteenth century, dur­
ing which the demand for everything from silverware to printed textiles led
more people of the middling sort to work harder, and vary the sort of work
that went on in the home, in order to produce and to purchase such coveted
 Material Witness 121

consumer goods. Material culture has supplied a key to understanding how

an emerging middle class evolved, as well as a market economy.
Yet the identities of material culture are not only collective and large
scale, but also small and intensely personal. More than we realize, perhaps,
the texture of our lives is built from the material world we incorporate in our
lives: a familiar mug in our hand as we nurse hot coffee every morning, the
comfort of a well-worn chair, the sheen of a pitcher passed down by a grand­
mother, the slim cell phone in our pocket. Material culture is in constant
flux. New items become necessities; old items grow less relevant, though
often still cherished. How long does one hold onto a treasured cupboard like
Hannah Barnard's? We can all appreciate the material bond with the past
expressed by Elizabeth Shackleton, an Englishwoman who in 1779 left the
house she had lived in for many years because her son Thomas had taken
possession of it upon marrying:

On this day I emptied all and everything belonging unto me out of my mahog­
any bookcase, bureau and drawers given unto me by my own tender, good,
most affectionate parent. They were made and finished by Henry Chatburne
on Saturday December the eighth one thousand seven hundred and fifty. I
value them much but relinquish the valuable loan with great satisfaction to my
own dear child Thomas Parker.

We are more than we eat, assuredly; more, even, than we build and make
and buy. But close attention to such matters reveals how intimately material
culture has shaped our lives, and the lives of those who came before us.
122 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home,
1760-1860 (New York, 1993), is an engaging introduction to material cul­
ture. A good example of how historians use diaries and material culture to
illuminate everyday life is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life
of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990). For
more on the artist who painted Quilting Frolic, see Anneliese Harding, John
Lewis Krimmel (Winterthur, DE, 1994). Color reproductions of the painting
on the Web may be found by searching for "Quilting Frolic" at the Images
tab at www.google.com. Memorial Hall Museum of Old Deerfield has an
online archive (http://www.old-deerfield.org/museum.htm) containing hun­
dreds of everyday objects that can be easily accessed and examined.
Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
(New York, 1992), superbly places material culture within a broader context,
as does Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in
the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001). For the consumer revo­
lution of the late eighteenth century, see John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds.,
Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993). T. H. Breen, The Mar­
ketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped Revolution (New York,
2004), also contains useful material. For the creation of a market economy
in the United States, see Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a
Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts (Chicago, 1992),
and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in
the American Ci-ty, 1760-1900 (New York, 1989).
PAST AND PRESENT

Inside the Information Revolution

You had to be there is the cliche suggesting that an event is difficult to under­
stand without having lived through it. For the historian, the opposite is often
true: you have to not have been there to understand it.
This chapter's exploration of material culture has looked at change over
decades, seeing how an industrial (or industrious) revolution transformed
American lives. But unlike the wrenching events of the French Revolution,
the changes of the Industrial Revolution took place gradually. They are
harder to see as revolutionary when living in their midst, plodding along
day by day.
For the past several decades, the world has been in the middle of an infor­
mation revolution. Though its larger contours are difficult to analyze as it
flows around us, we can employ the same process used in this chapter: exam­
ine the material culture of our own time as it has evolved. In 1990 landline
telephones were the norm and big, blocky mobile phones were exotic high­
tech devices flaunted by special agents in movies. Over the next two decades,
the phone was transformed. The Masai in Africa and Filipinos in rural vil­
lages now have slim cell phones that function as cameras, map locators, text
messengers, game players, as well as voice carriers.
Here is a list of objects whose alterations can be traced in similar fashion:
the vinyl record, the book, the motion picture film, the letter or telegram,
the typewriter. Each of these pieces of material culture has been used to con­
vey information. Each has evolved over several decades. LPs become CDs
become MP3 files. Letters become faxes become e-mails. The implications
for society have been huge, in terms of commercial enterprise, labor prac­
tices, family ties and friendship networks, and even the way the ideas of the
culture are disseminated.
Can you try not "being there" for a moment? Step back and ask how the
experience of childhood has changed because of the shift in information
technology. Which workers have gained more advantage and which less
from the information revolution? Has the Weh been a force promoting a
democratic culture or an authoritarian one?

123
CHAPTER 6

Jackson's Frontier­
and Turner's

The theories we use determine the questions we ask, whether we are

looking at the closing ofone frontier or the opening ofmany others.

C eremony, merriment, and ballyhoo came to Chicago in the summer of

1893, and predictably, the crowds swelled the fairgrounds to get a taste of
it. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show went through its usual broncobusting,
war-whooping routines. Visitors gawked at a giant map of the United States
fashioned entirely from pickles. Also on display were a huge telescope, des­
tined for Yerkes Observatory; a long-distance telephone, connected with
New York City; and a four-story-high cross section of a new ocean liner.
The amusement park-the Midway Plaisance-even boasted exotic exhib­
its in the living flesh: Irish peasants boiled potatoes over turf fires, Arabian
veiled women and turbaned elders occupied their own village, while "Prince
Pomiuk" of the Eskimos drove a dogsled through the warm summery dust.
The excuse for the fuss was Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition,
held ostensibly to salute the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the
Americas. More plausibly, the fair allowed proud Chicagoans to prove that
they were more than hog butchers to the world and that they could out­
exposition any metropolis on the globe. Given the total attendance of more
than 12 million people over six months, the city made its case.
To further the exposition's reputation, several scholarly congresses
were convened, including the World's Congress of Historians and His­
torical Students. And so on July 12, the curious tourist had the opportu­
nity (or misfortune) of straying away from the booming cannibal drums of
the Midway Plaisance and into the Art Institute, where five eager histo­
rians waited to present the fruits of their labors. On this hot evening, the
papers were read back-to-back without relief, ranging from a discussion
of "English Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ages" to "Early Lead Min­
ing in Illinois and Wisconsin." The hardy souls who had not been driven
off by the first four talks saw a young man in starched collar rise to pre­
sent yet another thesis, this one titled "The Significance of the Frontier
in American History."

124
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 125

The young man was FrederickJackson Turner, a historian from the Uni­
versity of Wisconsin. Although none in the audience could have suspected it,
his essay would spark four generations of scholarship and historical debate.
The novelty of Turner's frontier thesis resulted not from his discovery of
any previously unknown facts but from his proposal of a new theory, one
that took old facts and placed them in an entirely different light.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THEORY

Turner's thesis is only one of many theoretical concepts that historians
have used to bring order out of the chaotic past. Yet thus far, this book has
avoided a direct discussion of the term theory. It is time to make amends, for
theory is an essential part of the discipline of history, profoundly affecting
the way historians go about their work. Indeed, if history is not merely "the
past" itself but instead a reconstruction of it, theory could be said to supply
the blueprints needed to raise the edifice.
At one level, theory can be defined simply as hypothesis. In this sense,
it is the analysis that explains a relationship between two or more facts.
During the Salem witch trials, certain "afflicted" townspeople acted in violent
but consistent ways. Before historians could conclude that these acts might
constitute symptoms of neurotic behavior, they had to accept the concept of
conversion hysteria as a valid theoretical explanation. Note that the Salem
records do not provide this interpretation; theory is what supplies it.
In a broader sense, theory can be defined as a body of theorems present­
ing a systematic view of an entire subject. We use the term this way when
speaking of the "theory of wave mechanics" or a "germ theory of disease."
Often, small-scale theoretical constructs are a part of a larger theoretical
framework. Conversion hysteria is only one of many behavioral syndromes
classified as neuroses. In turn, the concept of neurosis is only one part of the
larger body of theory accepted by modern psychology. Physicists, chemists,
and other natural scientists often use mathematical formulas to summarize
their general theories, but among social scientists and humanists, theorems
become less mathematic and more elastic. Even so, when historians discuss a
"theory of democracy" or a "theory of economic growth," they are applying
a set of coherent principles to explain specific events.
Because historians study an event or period in its entirety, historical nar­
rative usually incorporates many theories rather than just one. The historian
of early Virginia will draw on theories of economic behavior (the develop­
ment of joint stock companies as a means of capital formation), sociology
(the rise of slavery as an institution of color), psychology (the causes of
friction between white and black laboring classes), and so on. In this broadest
sense, historical theory encompasses the entire range of a historian's train­
ing, from competence in statistics to opinions on politics and philosophies of
human nature. It is derived from formal education, from reading, even from
informal discussions with academic colleagues and friends.
126 AFTER THI!. FACT: THE AR.T OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Turner in 1893, the year he presented his thesis at the World's Columbian
Exposition; and the Johns Hopkins University seminar room for history students.
At the head of the t.able is Professor Herbert Baxter Adams, who argued that
American democratic institutions could be traced to British and European roots.
Turner resented the lack of interest in the West at Hopkins. "Not a man I know
here," he commented, "is either studying, or is hardly aware of the country behind
the Alleghenies."

It follows that theory in this wider sense-"grand theory," as it might be

called-plays a crucial role in historical reconstruction. While small-scale
theory is called on to explain specific puzzles (why didn't slavery become
entrenched in Virginia before 1660?), grand theory is usually part of a his-
torian's mental baggage before he or
she is immersed in a particular topic.
While small-scale theory is used Grand theory encourages historians
to explain specific puzzles, grand to ask certain questions and not oth­
theory is usually a pan of the ers. It tends to single out particular
mental baggage historians bring areas of investigation as worthy of
to a topic. testing and to dismiss other areas as
either irrelevant or uninteresting.
Thus anyone who ventures into the
field of history-the lay reader as well as the professional researcher-needs
to be aware of how grand theory exerts its influence. Nowhere in American
history is this influence better illustrated than in FrederickJackson T urner's
venerable frontier thesis.
Turner began his Chicago lecture with a simple yet startling fact he had
found in the recently released census of 1890. "Up to and including 1880,
the country had a frontier of settlement," the census reported, "hut at pres­
ent the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settle­
ment that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." Turner seized upon
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 12 7

this "event"-the passing of the frontier-as a "great historic moment."

T he reason for its importance to him seemed clear: "Up to our own day,
American history has been in a large degree the history of the coloniza­
tion of the Great West. T he existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain Ameri­
can development."
Turner's broad assertion-a manifesto, really-challenged on sev­
eral counts the prevailing historical wisdom. Scholars of Turner's day had
approached their subject with an Atlantic Coast bias. T hey viewed the
East, and especially New England, as the true bearer of American culture.
Developments beyond the Appalachian range were either ignored or treated
sketchily. Turner, who had grown up in the rural setting of Portage, Wiscon­
sin, and had taken his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin,
resented that attitude.
In addition, the reigning scholarship focused almost exclusively on politi­
cal and constitutional developments. "History is past Politics and Politics
present History" ran the slogan on the wall of the Johns Hopkins semi­
nar room in which Turner had taken his PhD. In contrast, young Turner
strongly believed that this narrow political perspective neglected the broader
contours of social, cultural, and economic history. Historians who took the
trouble to examine those areas, he felt, would discover that the unique physi­
cal and cultural conditions of the frontier, and not eastern cities, had shaped
American character.
T he frontier' s effect on American character had been recognized in a casual
way by earlier observers, but T urner attempted a more systematic analysis. In
doing so, he drew on the scientific grand theory most prominent in his own
day-Charles Darwin' s theory of evolution. Whereas Darwin had proposed an
explanation for evolution in the natural world, T urner suggested that America
was an ideal laboratory for the study of cultural evolution. T he American fron­
tier, he argued, returned human beings to a primitive state of nature. With the
trappings of civilization stripped away, the upward process of evolution was
reenacted. Dramatically, T urner recreated the sequence for his audience:

The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, indus­
tries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car
and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and
arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin.It puts him in the log cabin
of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before
long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he
shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.In short, at
the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.He must accept
the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the
Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the
wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe....The fact is that here is
a new product that is American.
12 8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Turner suggested that the evolution from frontier primitive to civilized

town dweller occurred not just once but time and time again,as the frontier
moved west. Each time, settlers shed a bit more of their European ways;
each time, a more distinctively American culture emerged. That was why
the perspective of eastern historians was so warped: they stubbornly traced
American roots to English political institutions or,worse,the medieval orga­
nization of the Germanic town."The true point of view in the history of this
nation is not the Atlantic coast," Turner insisted,"it is the Great West."
From this general formulation of the frontier's effects, Turner deduced
several specific traits that the recurring evolutionary process produced.Chief
among them were nationalism,independence,and democracy.
Nationalism, Turner argued, arose as the frontier broke down the geo­
graphic and cultural identities of the Atlantic Coast: New England with its
Yankees and the tidewater South with its aristocratic planters. The "mixing
and amalgamation " of sections was most clearly demonstrated in the middle
states, where both Yankees and
"The true point ofview in the history southerners migrated over the
mountains, where Germans and
of this nation is not the Atlantic
other northern Europeans joined
coast, " Frederick Jackson Turner the English in seeking land.There
insisted, "it is the Great West. " a new culture developed, possess­
ing "a solidarity of its own with
national tendencies . ... Interstate migration went steadily on-a process of
cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions." (Once again,note the Darwinian
metaphor of "cross-fertilization.")
The frontier also promoted independence,according to Turner.The first
English settlements had depended on the home country for their material
goods,but as settlers pressed farther west,England found it difficult to extend
that supply. Frontier towns became self-sufficient, and eastern merchants
increasingly provided westerners with American rather than English prod­
ucts.The economic system became more American,more independent.
Most important, suggested Turner, the individualism of the frontier pro­
moted democracy and democratic institutions."Complex society is precipitated
by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family,"
Turner argued. "The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control,
and particularly to any direct control." Thus westerners resented being taxed
without being represented,whether by England and Parliament or by Carolina
coastal planters. The frontier also broke down social distinctions that were so
much a part of the East and Europe.Given the fluid society of the frontier,poor
farmers or traders could and did become rich almost overnight.Social distinc­
tions disappeared when placed against the greater necessity of simple survival.
Turner even argued that the West, with its vast supply of "free land,"
encouraged democracy in the East. The frontier acted as a safety valve, he
suggested,draining off potential sources of discontent before they disrupted
society."Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East,when­
ever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 12 9

freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of
the frontier....Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent posi­
tion of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equal­
ity was theirs for the taking."
The upshot of this leveling process was nothing less than a new American
character.Turner waxed eloquent in his description of frontier traits:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness;

that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that master­
ful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great
ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for
good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with
freedom-these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere
because of the existence of the frontier.

What Turner offered his Chicago listeners was not only "the American,
this new man," as Hector St.John de Crevecoeur had called him in 1778,
but also a systematic explanation of how the new American had come to be.
It would be proper etiquette here to scold Turner's Chicago audience for
failing to recognize a masterpiece when they were read one. But in some
ways it is easier to explain his listeners' inattention than to account for the
phenomenal acceptance of the frontier thesis by later historians. Undeni­
ably, Turner's synthesis was fresh and creative. But as he himself admitted,
the essay was a hypothesis in need of research and testing. Of this, Turner
proved constitutionally incapable. Although he loved to burrow in the
archives for days on end,he found writing to be an unbearable chore.
Consequently,Turner published only magazine articles in the influential
Atlantic Monthly and other journals. But these articles, along with numer­
ous lectures and a gaggle of enthusiastic students,proved sufficient to make
Turner's reputation.Publishers flocked to Wisconsin,seeking books by the
celebrated historian. Turner, with hopelessly misplaced optimism, signed
contracts with four publishers to produce eight separate manuscripts.None
saw the light of day. The single book he completed (The Rise of the West,
1906) appeared only through the frantic efforts of editor Albert Bushnell
Hart, who wheedled, cajoled, and threatened in order to obtain the desired
results."It ought to be carved on my tombstone," Hart later remarked,"that
I was the only man in the world that secured what might be classed an ade­
quate volume from Turner."
Why Turner's remarkable success? Certainly not because of his detailed
research, which remained unpublished. Success was due to the attraction
of his grand theory. Later critics have taken Turner to task for imprecision
and vagueness,but these defects are compensated by an eloquence and mag­
nificence of scale. "The United States lies like a huge page in the history of
society," Turner would declaim, and then proceed to lay out history with a
continental sweep. The lure of his hypothesis for historians was much like
the lure of a unified field theory for natural scientists-a set of equations,as
physicist Freeman Dyson has remarked,that would "account for everything
13 0 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

that happens in nature ... a unifying principle that would either explain
everything or explain nothing." In similar (though less galactic) fashion,
Turner's theory captured historians' imaginations."The existence of an area
of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settle­
ment westward, explain American development." That proposal is about as
all-encompassing as a historian could desire!
The theory seemed encompassing, too, in its methods. The techniques
of social science in historical research are so familiar today that we forget
the novelty and brilliance of Turner's insistence on unifying the tools of
research.Go beyond politics, he argued; relate geography, climate, econom­
ics, and social factors to the political story.Not only did he propose this uni­
fication; Turner also provided a key focus-the frontier-as the laboratory in
which these variables could be studied.The fresh breeze of Turner's theory
succeeded in overturning the traditional approaches of eastern historians.
By the time Turner died in 1932, a
Turner's critics complained that tide of reaction had set in. Some crit­
his definition of the ''frontier" ics pointed out that the frontier thesis
was vague. Was it a geographical severely minimized the democratic
place? T he mechanism a safety and cultural contributions of the Eng­
valve? A type ofpersonality lish heritage. Others attacked Turn­
er's vague definition of the "frontier."
produced by a process? (Was it a geographical place? A type
of population, such as trappers, herders, and pioneers? Or a process wherein
European traits were stripped off and American ones formed?) Other crit­
ics disputed the notion of the frontier as a "safety valve " for the East. Few
European immigrants actually settled on the frontier; if anything, population
statistics showed more farmers moving to the cities.
For our own purposes, however, it would be misleading to focus on these
battles.Whether or not Turner was right, his theory dramatically influenced
the investigations of other historians. To understand how, we need to take
Turner's general propositions and look at the way he and others applied
them to a specific topic.
An ideal subject for this task is the man whose name Turner himself
shared-Andrew Jackson.* Jackson is one of those figures in history who, like
Captain John Smith, seems always to be strutting about the stage just a bit
larger than life. Furthermore, Jackson's wanderings took him straight into
the most central themes of American history.Old Hickory, as his troops nick­
named him, led land-hungry pioneers into the southeastern United States,
displacing Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi, expelling the
Spanish from Florida, and repelling the British from New Orleans.As presi­
dent, he launched the war against the "monster " Bank of the United States,
placing himself at the center of the perennial American debate over the role
of economic power in a democracy. Above all, he came to be seen as the

*The sharing of names is more than coincidence. Frederick Jackson Turner's father, Andrew Jack­
son Turner, was born in 1832 and named in honor of President Jackson, reelected that year.
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 13 1

political champion of the common people. Here is a man whose career makes
it impossible to avoid the large questions that grand theory will suggest.
How, then, did Turner's frontier hypothesis shape historians' perception
of Jackson? What features of his career did it encourage them to examine?

JACKSON: A FRONTIER DEMOCRAT

(TARNISHED)
For Frederick Turner, Andrew Jackson was not merely "one of the favor­
ites of the West," he was "the West itself." By that rhetorical proclama­
tion Turner meant thatJackson's whole life followed precisely the pattern of
frontier evolution wherein eastern culture was stripped bare and replaced by
the "contentious, nationalistic democracy of the interior."
Jackson's Scotch-Irish parents had joined the stream of eighteenth-century
immigrants who landed in Pennsylvania, pushed westward until they bumped
up against the Appalachians, and then filtered southwest into the Carolina
backcountry. This was the process of"mixing and amalgamation" that Turner
outlined in his essay. Turner had also shown how the frontier stripped away
higher social organizations, leaving only the family as a sustaining bond.
AndrewJackson was denied even that society. His father died beforeJackson's
birth; his only two brothers and his mother died during the Revolution. At the
age of seventeen, Andrew left Waxhaw, his boyhood home, never to return
again. In effect, he was a man without a family-but not, as Turner saw it, a
man without a backcountry.
Jackson first moved to the town of Salisbury, North Carolina, reading
law by day and, with the help of high-spirited young friends, raising hell by
night. Brawling in barrooms, sporting with young ladies, moving outhouses
in the wee hours past midnight-such activities gaveJackson a reputation as
"the most roaring, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, mischievous
fellow that ever lived in Salisbury," according to one resident.
In 1788 the footloose Jackson grabbed the opportunity to become public
prosecutor for the western district of North Carolina, a region that then
stretched all the way to the Mississippi. There, in the frontier lands that now
constitute Tennessee, Jackson hoped to make his reputation. Once settled
in Nashville, he handled between a quarter and a half of all court cases in
his home county during the first few years of his arrival. And he dispensed
justice with the kind of "coarseness and strength" Turner associated with
the frontier personality. When one enraged defendant stepped on prosecu­
tor Jackson's toe to indicate his displeasure, Jackson calmly coldcocked the
offender with a stick of wood. On another occasion, after Jackson had been
appointed superior court judge in the newly created state of Tennessee, he
stalked off the bench to summon a defendant before the court when no one
else dared, including the sheriff and posse. The man in question, one Russell
Bean, had threatened to shoot the "first skunk that came within ten feet,"
but when Jackson came roaring out of the courthouse, Bean pulled in his
132 AFTER THE FACT: Tm: AR.T OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Jackson the frontiersman: Russell Bean surrenders to Justice Jackson, as depicted

in an1817 biography. Wrote Turner, "If Henry Clay was one of the favorites of
the West, Andrew Jackson was the West itself ...the very personification of the
contentious, nationalistic democracy of the interior."

horns. "I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot," said Bean, "and there
wasn't shoot in nary other eye in the crowd; and so I says to myself, says I,
hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did."
All in all, Jackson seemed a perfect fit for frontier democrat. Turner
described in characteristic terms Jackson's election to Congress in 1796:

The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress was an omen

full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close of Washington's
administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight hundred miles to his
destination. Gallatin (himself a western Pennsylvanian) afterwards graphi­
cally described Jack:son, as he entered the halls of Congress, as "a tall, lank,
uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and
a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and
deportment those of a rough backwoodsman." Jefferson afterwards testified
to Webster: "His passions are terrible.When I was President of the Senate,
he was a Senator, and he could never speak, on account of the rashness of his
feelings.I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage."
At length the frontier, in the person of its leader, had found a place in the gov­
ernment.This six-foot backwoodsman, angular, lantern-jawed, and th.in, with
blue eyes that blazed on occasion; this choleric, impetuous, Scotch-Irish leader
of men; th.is expert duellist and ready fighter; th.is embodiment of the conten­
tious, vehement, personal west, was in politics to stay.
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 13 3

This was Turner at his rhetorical best, marshaling all the striking per­
sonal details that supported his theory. But he was not writing a full-length
biography and so confined his discussion of Jackson mostly to a few para­
graphs of detail.
One of Turner's graduate students went further. Thomas Perkins Aber­
nethy studied at Harvard during the period when the university had lured
Turner east from his home ground at the University of Wisconsin. Aber­
nethy believed that to test the frontier thesis, it ought to be examined on
a local level, in more detail. In this respect, he felt, previous historians had
not been scientific enough. "Science is studied by the examination of speci­
mens, and general truths are discovered through the investigations of typical
forms," he asserted. In contrast, "history has been studied mainly by national
units, and the field is too broad to allow of minute examination." But Ten­
nessee provided a perfect "specimen" of the western state. It broke away
from its parent, North Carolina, during its frontier days; it was the first area
of the nation to undergo territorial status; and from its backwoods settle­
ments came Andrew Jack:son himself. Why not trace the leavening effects of
the frontier within this narrower compass? Abernethy set out to do just that
in his book From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee.
He had learned the techniques of his mentor well. Turner emphasized
the role of free land as a crucial factor in the West. Abernethy agreed that
land was "the chief form of wealth in the United States in its early years" and
carefully studied the political controversies over Tennessee's vast tracts of
land. Always he determined to look beyond the surface of the political arena
to the underlying economic and geographic considerations.
Such techniques were Turner's, but the results produced anything but
Turner's conclusions. From Frontier to Plantation is dedicated to Frederick
Jackson Turner, but the book directly refutes Turner's optimistic version of
western history.
As Abernethy began unraveling the tangled web of Carolina-Tennessee
politics, he discovered that Americans interested in western land included
more than pioneer squatters and yeoman farmers of the "interior democ­
racy." Prosperous speculators who preferred the comforts of the civilized
East saw equally well that forested, uncultivated land would skyrocket in
value once settlers poured over the Appalachians in search of homesteads.
The scramble for land revealed itself in the strange and contradictory
doings of the North Carolina legislature. During the Revolution, inflation
had plagued the state, largely because the legislature had continuously issued
its own paper money when short of funds. The value of this paper money
plummeted to a fraction of its original face value. After the war, the legis­
lature retrenched by proclaiming that all debtors would have to repay their
debts in specie (that is, in gold or silver coins) or its equivalent in paper
money. If, for example, the going rate set $1 in silver or gold as equal to $400
in paper notes and a person owed $10, the debtor would owe $4,000 in paper
money. In effect, the legislature was repudiating its paper currency and say­
ing that only gold or silver would be an acceptable medium of exchange.
13 4 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

This move made sense if the legislature was trying to put the state' s
finances on a stable footing. But Abernethy noticed that in the same session,
the legislature turned around and issued a new run of paper money-printing
up $100,000. Why issue more paper money when you've just done your best
to get rid of the older stuff ?
Abernethy also noticed that during the same legislative session, land
offices were opened up to sell western lands-but only under certain condi­
tions. The claimant had to go out into the woods and mark some prelimi­
nary boundaries, then come back and enter the claim at a designated land
office. Finally, a government surveyor would survey the lot, submit a report
to the secretary of state for the governor' s authentication, and enter it in the
county register.
The situation hardly confirmed Turner' s democratic conception of the
frontier, Abernethy concluded. First, who ended up being able to buy the
new land? Not the squatter or yeoman farmer, certainly-few of them could
fulfill the requirements of marking out land, returning East to register it, hav­
ing it officially surveyed, and enter­
T he frontier seemed to he governed ing it. Instead, land speculators in
less by Turner's simple democrats the East, including state legislators,
than Abernethy's rich speculators. stepped in to make a killing. The
career of William Blount, one of
the most successful speculators, illustrated the process at work. As a state
legislator, Blount helped write the new land laws. At the same time, he hired
a woodsman to go west and mark out vast tracts. Blount, for his part, regis­
tered the claim and paid for the land.
Sometimes the money that paid for the land was the old paper currency,
bought up for a fraction of its original price from poorer folk who had no
means of claiming their own land. But the legislature also allowed purchas­
ers to pay for the lands using the new paper money at face value. Was it
coincidence only that Blount had been the legislator proposing the new issue
of paper money? Abernethy thought not.
Instead of confirming Turner' s version of a hardy democracy, then,
Abernethy painted a picture of "free" Tennessee lands providing fortunes
for already powerful men. Blount used "the entire Southwest [as] his hunt­
ing ground and he stuffed his pockets with the profits of his speculations
in land. In the maw of his incredible ambition-or greed-there originated
land grabs involving thousands of choice acres." And Blount was only one of
many across the country. "In those days," Abernethy concluded, "America
was run largely by speculators in real estate."
It was into this free-for-all country that AndrewJackson marched in 1788,
but Abernethy's new frame of reference placed his career in a different light.
Compare Turner's description of Jackson's "pioneer" ride to Philadelphia
with Abernethy's version ofJackson's horseback arrival in Tennessee. "Tradi­
tion has it," reported Abernethy, thatJackson
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 13 5

arrived atJonesboro ... riding a fine horse and leading another mount, with
saddlebags, gun, pistols, and fox-hounds. This was elaborate equipment for a
struggling young lawyer, and within the year he increased it by the purchase
of a slave girl. ...Jackson still found time to engage in his favorite sport of
horse-racing, and he fought a bloodless duel with Waightstill Avery, then the
most famous lawyer in western North Carolina.All this makes it clear that the
young man had set himself up in the world as a "gentleman." Frontiersmen
normally fought with their fists rather than with pistols, and prided themselves
more upon physical prowess, than upon manners.Though commonly looked
upon as a typical Westerner,Jackson was ever an aristocrat at heart.

Jackson cemented his ties with the upper layers of society in more substan­
tial ways. Turner had noted Jackson's practice as a "public prosecutor-an
office that called for nerve and decision, rather than legal acumen." What
frontier lawyering also called for, which Turner neglected to mention, was
a knack for collecting debts, since Jackson most often represented creditors
intent on recovering loans. During his first month of legal practice, he issued
some seventy writs to delinquent debtors. T his energetic career soon came to
the notice of William Blount, who had by this time gotten himself appointed
governor of the newly created Tennessee territory. He and Jackson became
close political allies.
Jackson, too, had an eye for speculating, and it almost ruined him. Like
Blount, he had cashed in on Tennessee's lands, buying 50,000 acres on the
site of the future city of Memphis. In 1795 Jackson took his first ride to
Philadelphia, a year before the one Turner eloquently described, in order
to sell the Memphis land at a profit. Few Philadelphians wanted to buy, but
Jackson finally closed a deal with David Allison, another of Blount's cronies.
Allison couldn't pay in cash, so he gave Jackson promissory notes. Jackson,
in turn, used the notes to pay for goods to stock a trading post he wanted to
open in Tennessee.
Scant months after Jackson returned home, he learned that David Allison
had gone bankrupt. Even worse, since Jackson had signed Allison's promis­
sory notes, Allison's creditors were now after Jackson. "We take this early
opportunity to make known to you that we have little or no expectations of
getting paid from him," they wrote, "and that we shall have to get our money
from you." T his financial nightmare left Jackson "placed in the Dam'st situ­
ation ever a man was placed in," he admitted. T o get himself out, he was
forced to speculate even more. Buy a parcel of land here, sell it there. Cash
in the trading post, make a small profit, invest it in more land, exchange the
new land for another buyer's promissory note. And so on. Not until 1824
did he settle the final claims in the tangle. Clearly, Abernethy believed that
Jackson's horseback rides on behalf of real estate deserved more emphasis
than any romantic notions of a galloping frontier democrat.
Despite such a devastating attack on the frontier thesis, Abernethy's
admiration for T urner was genuine, no doubt because he recognized how
13 6 AFrmt THE FACT! TBE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Jackson the gentleman: Thomas Abernethy argued that the history ofJackson's
Tennessee demonstrated how "the wealthy rose to the top of affairs even on the
frontier, and combined through their influence and common interests to control
economic legislation. From time to time they found it necessary to make some
obvious concession to democracy, such as broadening the suffrage or lowering the
qualifications for office. But, while throwing out such sops with one hand, they
managed to keep well in the other the more obscure field of economic legislation."
The aristocratic portrait ofJackson is by Thomas Sully.

much the thesis had guided his research. It is easy to conclude that the value
of a theory rests solely on its truth. Yet even if Turner's hypothesis erred
on many points, it provided a focus that prodded Abernethy to investigate
important historical questions-the implications of western land policy, the
effect of environment on character, the social and geographic foundations of
democracy. All these topics had been slighted by historians.
Theory, in other words, is often as important for the questions it raises
as for the answers it provides. In this sense it perfonns the same function
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 13 7

in the natural sciences. Thomas Kuhn, a historian of science, has demon­

strated how indispensable an older scientific theory is in pointing the way
to the theory that replaces it. As the old theory is tested, attention naturally
turns to problem areas-places where the results are not what the old theory
predicts. The new theory emerges, Kuhn pointed out, "only for the man
who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that
something has gone wrong." Abernethy was able to discern that something
had "gone wrong" in Tennessee politics, but only because Turner's hypoth­
esis showed him what questions needed to be asked and where to look for
answers.

JACKSON: LABORER'S FRIEND

Theory, then, can actually sharpen a historian's vision by limiting it-zeroing
in on important issues and data. It stands to reason, however, that trade-offs
are made in this game. If a theory focuses attention on certain questions, it
necessarily also causes a historian to ignore other facts, trends, or themes.
Theory can limit in a negative as well as a positive sense.
Abernethy's disagreement with Turner illustrates this problem. Although
the two historians reached diametrically opposed conclusions about Jackson,
they carried on the debate within the framework of Turner's thesis. Did
Jackson embody the democratic, individualistic West? Yes, argued Turner.
No, countered Abernethy. Yet both accepted the premise suggested by the
thesis, that the influence of the West was crucial.
That conclusion might serve well enough for a study limited to Tennessee
politics, but Jackson went on to achieve national fame by winning the Battle
of New Orleans and was elected to the presidency in 1828. He triumphed
in all the southern coastal states and in Pennsylvania, and he also received
a majority of New York's electoral votes. In New York, too, he cemented
an alliance with Martin Van Buren, the sophisticated eastern leader of the
Albany Regency political faction.
Such facts call attention to something that Turner's frame of reference
overlooked. As a national leader, Jackson made friends in the East as well as
the West, in cities as well as in the country. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
believing that both Abernethy and Turner overemphasized Jackson's west­
ern roots, determined to examine the eastern sources of Jackson's demo­
cratic coalition. The result was The Age ofJackson (1945), a sweeping study
that highlighted the influence of eastern urban laboring classes on Jackso­
nian democracy.
In part, Schlesinger's theoretical approach was influenced by his upbring­
ing. He spent his childhood within the civilized neighborhood of Cam­
bridge, Massachusetts, where his father, Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr., held
a chair in history at Harvard. Unlike Frederick Jackson Turner, the senior
Schlesinger emphasized the role of urban society and culture in American
life. His article "The City in American History" sparked a generation of
13 8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

scholarship on peculiarly urban problems such as industrial labor and immi­

gration. The article, Schlesinger later suggested generously, "did not seek to
destroy the frontier theory but to substitute a balanced view: an appreciation
of both country and city in the rise of American civilization." Nevertheless,
Schlesinger Sr.'s interest clearly lay with the cities.
T he younger Schlesinger admired his father and his work-so much so that
at the age of fifteen he changed his name from Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
to Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. After
If the cities produced a democratic schooling at the prestigious Phillips
Exeter Academy, Arthur completed a
labor force solid for Andrew
brilliant undergraduate and graduate
Jackson, why was ''frontier career at Harvard.* It was out of this
democracy" so important? intellectual training that Schlesinger
wrote his book.
The Age ofJackson also reflected a set of attitudes and emphases popular
in the 1930s that distanced Schlesinger from the Progressive outlook Turner
had shared at the turn of the century. The thirties saw the country plunged
into a depression so severe that it shook many Americans' faith in the tradi­
tional economic system. Theories of class struggle, of conflict between capi­
tal and labor, became popular in scholarly circles. As an avid supporter of
Franklin Roosevelt, Schlesinger by no means accepted the doctrines of the
communist left, but he did believe that class conflict played a greater role in
American history than the sectional disputes that T urner had emphasized.
Given Schlesinger's background, his research focused on substantially
different aspects of Jackson's career. It portrayed Old Hickory as a natu­
ral leader who, though he came from the West, championed the cause of
laborers in all walks of life-city "mechanicks" as well as yeoman farmers.
Jackson's chief political task, argued Schlesinger, was "to control the power
of the capitalist groups, mainly Eastern, for the benefit of the noncapital­
ist groups, farmers and laboring men, East, West, and South." Schlesinger
made his opposition to Turner abundantly clear:

The basic Jacksonian ideas came naturally enough from the East, which best
understood the nature of business power and reacted most sharply against it.
The legend that Jacksonian democracy was the explosion of the frontier, lift­
ing into the government some violent men filled with rustic prejudices against
big business does not explain the facts, which were somewhat more complex.
Jacksonian democracy was rather a second American phase of that enduring
struggle between the business community and the rest of society which is the
guarantee of freedom in a liberal capitalist state.

Consequently, much of The Age ofJackson is devoted to people the Turner

school neglected entirely: the leaders of workingmen's parties, the broader

*In fact, Schlesinger Sr. firmly believed in the virtues of public education. But he felt compelled to
send Arthur Jr. to Exeter after discovering that his tenth-grade public school teacher taught that
"the inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos because of their white hair and pink eyes."
 ]flCkson's Fruntier-tmd Turner's 139

Jackson, champion of the working people: "The legend that Jacksonian

democracy was the explosion of the frontier, lifting into the government some
violent men filled with rustic prejudices against big business does not explain the
&.cts," wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Here, the general public (dubbed "King Mob"
byJackson's genteel opponents) goes to work on a giant cheese at a W'hite House
celebration in 183 7. The ordor of the cheese lingered for months.

labor movement, and the efforts of Democratic politicians to bring laborers

within the orbit ofJackson's party. Abemethy's treatment ofJackson as land
speculator is replaced by attention to Jack:son's vigorous war on the Second
Bank of the United States, where Democratic leaders are shown forging an
alliance with labor. "During the Bank War," Schlesinger concluded, "labor­
ing men began slowly to turn to Jackson as their leader, and his party as
their party."
Like Turner, Schlesinger came wider critical fire. Other historians have
argued that much ofJackson's so-called labor support was actually middle- or
even upper-class leaders who hoped to channel worker sentiments for their
own purposes. At the same time, many in the real laboring classes refused to
support Jackson. But again-what is important for our present purposes is to
notice how Schlesinger's general concerns shaped his research. It is not coin­
cidental that Jack:son' s celebrated kitchen cabinet, in Schlesinger's retelling,
bears a marked resemblance to the "brain trusters" of Franklin Roosevelt's
cabinet. It is not coincidental that Jackson attacks the "monster Bank" for
140 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

wreaking economic havoc much the way that FDR inveighed against the
"economic royalists" of the Depression era. Nor is it coincidental that The
Age ofJackson was followed, in 19 5 7, by The Age ofRoosevelt. Schlesinger may
have displayed his political and economic philosophy more conspicuously
than most historians, but no scholar can escape bringing some theoretical
framework to his or her research. One way or another, theory inevitably
limits and focuses the historian's perspective.

JACKSON AND THE NEW WESTERN

HISTORY
Perhaps precisely because Schlesinger does wear his political heart on his
sleeve, we are forced to consider a notion that is potentially more troubling.
The term theory implies that a historian, like some scientist in a lab, arrives
at his or her propositions in a rigorous, logical way, setting aside the con­
troversies of the present in order to study the past on its own terms. But in
Schlesinger's case-like it or not-the events of his day clearly influenced
his approach to Andrew Jackson. For that matter, Turner's original frontier
thesis was a product of his times. It was the census of 1890, after all, that
caught Turner's attention, with its declaration that the frontier was essen­
tially closed. It was Turner's rural, midwestern upbringing that encouraged
him to dissent from eastern-trained historians in his search for an explana­
tion of democracy in America. Indeed, Turner would have been the first to
recognize the pull of contemporary affairs. "Each age writes the history of
the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time,"
he commented in 1891.
The notion that historians' theories are tainted by a kind of presentism
troubles many, including some historians. "The present-minded contend
that in writing history no historian can free himself of his total experience,"
complained one scholar, who was clearly unhappy with the notion that others
might think he could not help being swayed by contemporary "passions, prej­
udices, assumptions, prepossessions, events, crises and tensions." Surely he
was right in believing that those who reconstruct the past should not do vio­
lence to it by making it over in the image of the present. Yet for better or for
worse-perhaps we should say, for better and for worse-historical theories
are shaped by the present in which they arise. There is no escaping current
events-only, through careful self-discipline, the opportunity of using the
perspectives of the present to broaden our understanding rather than lessen
it. A case study of present-mindedness at work can be found among those
historians who more recently have reexamined the field Turner championed.
Their movement has come to be known as the "new western history."
The generation of historians spearheading the new western history came
of age, by and large, during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s,
an era during which African Americans led a revolution for civil rights and
equal treatment under the law. Other minorities, too, sought a greater voice
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 141

in American society, whether they were Indians seeking tribal lands and
tribal rights or Chicano migrant laborers organizing for fair working condi­
tions. During these same years, feminists rallied to obtain equal treatment,
and an environmental movement questioned the prevailing boom mentality
in American life that equated all economic growth with progress. All these
forces for change challenged traditional ways of thinking, and regardless of
whether historians themselves became
For historian Patricia Limerick, social activists, many were moved to
that seemingly innocuous phrase reevaluate their perspectives on history.
''free land" served as a big, For historians of the West, the experi­
flapping redflag. ences of these decades were eye-opening
in a host of different ways.
Return for a moment to Turner's central proposition: "The existence of
an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American
settlement westward, explain American development." For historian Patricia
Limerick, that seemingly innocuous phrase "free land" served as a big, flap­
ping red flag. The ferment of the sixties and seventies made it much more
evident that calling such land "free" loaded the dice. In framing a working
hypothesis, historians glided over the inconvenient fact that the lands "were
not vacant, but occupied," as Limerick pointed out, by Indians who used
them either for hunting or for the cultivation of their own crops. "Redis­
tributing those lands to the benefit of white farmers required the removal of
Indian territorial claims and of the Indians themselves-a process that was
never simple." The title of Limerick's book, The Legacy of Conquest (1987),
framed the issue in blunt terms. Conquest was what made land "free," for
the land had been taken either without permission or with only the most
token of payments dispensed under dubious circumstances.
Consider another phrase plucked out of Turner's sentence: "the advance
of American settlement westward." Turner tended to view the frontier as
essentially one-dimensional. Americans-by which he meant Americans
primarily of English heritage-moved westward across the "wilderness,"
evolving a new democratic society as they went. But the notion of wilder­
ness was a theoretical construct that implicitly denied the existence of any
significant borderland cultures other than Anglo-American. The new voices
of the sixties and seventies-Indian, Latino, and African American-pushed
historians to recognize that the frontiers of North America were both mul­
ticultural and multidirectional. Spanish settlers spread northward from
Central America and the Caribbean into Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and
California. Chinese and Japanese immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century
moved from west to east as they crossed the Pacific to California. And for
the various Indian tribes themselves, frontier lines were shifting in all direc­
tions during the unsettled centuries following European contact.
Turner showed little interest in the cultural mixing that went on in these
regions, a defect the new western history sought to correct. "The invaded
and subject peoples of the West must be given a voice in the region's his­
tory," argued Donald Worster in 1989. "Until very recently many western
142 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

historians acted as though the West had either been empty of people prior
to the coming of the white race or was quickly, if bloodily, cleared of them,
once and for all, so that historians had only to deal with the white point of
view." But Worster suggested that the "younger generation appearing in the
1970s and '80s" made the "new multicultural perspective their own." They
replaced Turner's unidirectional frontier with a portrait of a West that "has
been on the forward edge of one of modern history's most exciting endeav­
ors, the creation, in the wake of European expansion and imperialism, of the
world's first multi-racial, cosmopolitan societies." Newcomers to western
cities often found as many-or more-foreign languages spoken there than
as in New York, Paris, or Moscow.
Historians' attitudes toward Andrew Jackson could hardly be expected to
remain untouched by these currents of change. Even before the new western
history came into vogue, historians had begun reevaluating Jackson's career.
For historian Michael Rogin, who wrote about Jackson during the tumultu­
ous seventies, Old Hickory was the "embodiment" of the West for reasons
entirely different from Turner's.Jackson embodied the West simply because
he was instrumental in driving the Indians from their lands. "Historians have
failed to place Indians at the center of Jackson's life," Rogin argued. "They
have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every perspective but Indian
destruction, the one from which it actually developed historically."
Robert Remini made a similar case in his biography of Jackson, the first
volume of which appeared in 1977. Time after time, Jackson led efforts to
force Indians to sign treaties ceding millions of acres. While he served as
major general of the Tennessee militia and later as major general in the U.S.
army,Jackson consistently exceeded his instructions on such matters. At the
conclusion of his war against the Creek Indians, the remnants of the Creek
Red Stick faction (whom Jackson had been :fighting) retreated to Florida
in hopes of continuing their war. Since the general could not compel his
enemies to cede land, he turned around and demanded 2 3 million acres from
his Indian allies, signing the treaty instead with them! Fearing that the gov­
ernment might revoke such a brazen action, he called for the new boundary
lines to be run and land sold to settlers as quickly as possible. "The sooner
this country is brought in the market the better," he advised President-Elect
James Monroe, on yet another occasion. Over the years, Jackson's negotia­
tions led to the acquisition by the United States of Indian lands amounting to
one-third of Tennessee, three-quarters of Alabama and Florida, one-fifth of
Georgia and Mississippi, and one-tenth of Kentucky and North Carolina.
Of course, Jackson's involvement in land acquisition did not end with
his military career. As president, he championed the movement to force the
remaining 125,000 Indians east of the Mississippi onto much less valuable
lands west of the river, freeing up additional millions of prime acres in the
midst of the booming cotton kingdom. At the president's urging, Congress
set the policy of Indian removal into motion in 1830. "In terms of acquisi­
tion," commented Remini, "it is not too farfetched to say that the physi­
cal shape of the United States today looks pretty much like it does largely
because of the intentions and efforts of Andrew Jackson."
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 14 3

Perhaps ironically, none of the new western historians has yet stepped
forward to recast Jackson in light of recent scholarship. In part, the lack
of attention arises because many younger scholars have preferred to focus
on the trans-Mississippi West, well beyond the territory Andrew Jackson
roamed. Yet there is more at work here than a different geographic focus.
In many ways, the questions posed by the new western historians cannot
be answered by making Jackson the
By adopting the metaphor of a center of attention. Focusing on the
actions of the Anglo conquerors like
"middle ground, " Richard "White
Jackson tells us little about the inter­
proposed a situation in which
mixture of cultures that arose before
"whites could neither dictate to removal began, during an era when
Indians nor ignore them. " both whites and Indians held signif­
icant power along the frontier.
One of the new western historians, Richard White, examined the fron­
tier of the seventeenth and eighteenth century along the Great Lakes in a
book suggestively titled The Middle Ground. White argued that older dis­
cussions of the frontier portrayed the contrasting cultures as essentially and
always in opposition. In contrast, White preferred to highlight a process of
accommodation at work. By adopting the metaphor of a "middle ground,"
he highlighted a situation in which "whites could neither dictate to Indians
nor ignore them. Whites needed Indians as allies, as partners in exchange, as
sexual partners, as friendly neighbors." Only with the passing of this frontier
did the middle ground break down, accompanied by a hardening of attitudes
among whites, a "re-creation of the Indians as alien, as exotic, as other."
From this perspective, Jackson and his policies of Indian removal seem
only the depressing endgame of what is the more interesting and neglected
territory of the middle ground. Indeed, the Old Southwest from about 1780
to 1820-the middle ground Jackson traveled-was a region rich in cultural
accommodation. For two hundred years the land had witnessed a remark­
able intermingling of Indian, French, Spanish, and English cultures. From
its base in Florida, Spain actively courted trade with Indians, many of whom
had intermarried with whites. The trader Alexander McGillivray, for exam­
ple, was not the white European his name conjures up, but an influential
Indian leader of the Creeks who concluded a treaty of alliance between his
people and the Spanish in 1784. His parentage reflected the mixed heritage
of the middle ground: a mother of French-Creek descent and a father who
was a Scots trader.
Adding to the regional mixture of the Old Southwest were African Amer­
icans. White traders who intermarried with Indians were the first among
the Cherokees, Creeks, and other tribes to clear cotton plantations and use
slaves to work them. Often these slaves were runaways whose skills the Indi­
ans drew upon in their attempt to emulate white plantation owners. African
Americans knew how to spin and weave, shoe horses, and repair guns. Often
they served as translators. Ironically, as a minority of Cherokees adopted a
frame of government similar to the U.S. Constitution, they also set up slave
codes similar to those in the white antebellum South.
144 AFn:K THE FACT: THE AR.T OF HISTOBICAL DETECTION

This Chickasaw Indian girl's elegant hair and fashionable dress suggest the
complexity of cultural relations in the middle ground of the Old Southwestern
frontier in Andrew Jackson's time. The girl was among the thousands of Indians
removed to territory west of the Mississippi.

Seminole Indians also held slaves, although they gave more autonomy
to these "black Seminoles," as the slaves were known. When runaways fled
Spanish or American plantations for Seminole lands, the Seminoles allowed
the newcomers to live in separate villages, often far from their Indian own­
ers. In return for being allowed to raise crops, black Seminoles paid a por­
tion of the harvest to their masters-in effect, sharecropping. ff, as Donald
Worster suggested, the lure of the new western history involved tracing a
process of multiracial, multicultural mixing along the frontier, topics such
as the middle ground held a greater attraction than did rehashing the tradi­
tional stories of Andrew Jackson as Indian fighter.
After such a procession of grand historical theories, what may be said of
the "real" Andrew Jackson? Skeptics may be tempted to conclude that there
was not one but four Old Hickories roaming the landscape of Jacksonian
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 14 5

America: Jackson the frontier democrat; Jackson the aristocratic planter and
speculator; Jackson, friend of labor; and Jackson, taker of Indian lands. The
use of historical theory seems to have led the reader into a kind of boggy
historical relativism where there is no real Jackson, only men conjured up to
fit the formulas of particular historical theories or the fashionable currents
of the day.
But that viewpoint is overly pessimistic. It arises from the necessary
emphasis of this chapter, where our concern has been to point out the gen­
eral effects of grand theory rather than to evaluate the merits of each case.
Theory, we have stressed, provides a vantage point that directs a researcher's
attention to significant areas of inquiry. But the initial theorizing is only the
beginning. Theories can be and are continually tested. Sometimes old theo­
ries are thrown out, replaced by new ones. In such fashion did Copernicus
replace Ptolemy. On the other hand, some theories stand up to testing or
are merely refined to fit the facts more closely. In yet other instances, old
theories are incorporated into more encompassing frameworks. Newtonian
mechanics are still as valid as ever for the everyday world, but they have been
found to be only a special case of the broader theories of relativity proposed
by Einstein.
Historical theory will probably never attain the precision of its counter­
parts among the natural sciences. In part, such precision remains beyond our
reach because historical narrative seeks to account for specific, unique chains
of events-events that can never be replicated in the way scientists replicate
experiments in the lab. The complexity of the task will no doubt ensure that
our explanations will remain subject, for better and for worse, to contempo­
rary concerns. Of all people, historians should be the first to acknowledge
that they are shaped by the currents of their own times.
But that does not mean historians must give up on the possibility of
describing and explaining an objective reality. In the present example, we
may argue that far from having four differentJacksons roaming the historical
landscape, we are seeing various aspects ofJackson's personality and career
that need to be incorporated into a more comprehensive framework. It is
the old tale of the blind men describing the different parts of an elephant:
the elephant is real enough, but the descriptions are partial and fragmentary.
Frederick Jackson Turner was writing about a nebulous Jacksonian style.
Indeed, one may as well come out with it-"democracy" and "individual­
ism" were, for Turner, little more than styles. Abernethy, on the other hand,
focusing on the material interests and class alliances thatJackson developed
during his Tennessee career, paid almost no attention to the presidential
years. Schlesinger did precisely the opposite: he picked up Jackson's story
only after 1824 and in the end was more concerned with the Jacksonian
movement than with its nominal leader. The historians who came of age in
the 1960s and 1970s have replaced Turner's imaginary frontier line with a
contested cultural space whose middle grounds are populated with a Jackso­
nian "common people" more multiracial and diverse than Turner was ever
able to conceive.
146 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

A unified field theory for Jacksonian America? Perhaps the outlines are
there, but the task of deciding must be left to some future Turner of the dis­
cipline. What remains clear is that though particular theories continue to be
revised or rejected, theory itself will accompany historians always. Without
it, researchers cannot begin to select from among an infinite number of facts;
they cannot separate the important from the incidental; they cannot focus
on a manageable problem. Albert Einstein put the proposition succinctly.
"It is the theory," he concluded, "which decides what we can observe."
 Jackson's Frontier-and Turner's 147

Additional Reading

FrederickJackson Turner's key essays are reprinted in The Frontier in Ameri­

can History (New York, 1920). He also wrote The Rise of the New West (New
York, 1906). The best accounts of Turner's life and work are by Ray Billing­
ton, the last major Turnerian; see Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar,
Teacher (New York, 1973) and The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis (San Marino,
CA, 1971). A contrasting view may be found in Richard Hofstadter, The Pro­
gressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968). In addition
to Thomas Abernethy's From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1932), see his brief biography of Jackson in the Dictionary ofAmerican
Biography. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Age ofJackson (Boston, 1945) generated
much discussion among historians, discussion that is summarized well in the
bibliographical essay of Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personal­
ity, and Politics, Rev. ed. (Homewood, IL, 1978). For a balanced portrait of
Jackson's place in the political landscape, see Harry L. Watson, Liberty and
Power (New York, 1990).
The views of the new western history are expounded in Patricia Lim­
erick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New
York, 1987); Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the
American West (New York, 1992); and William Cronon, George Miles, and
Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New
York, 1992). Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the
Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991) provides
one of the best models of the new approaches. Finally, to understand the
role of theory in both science and history, readers will profit from Thomas
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rev. ed. (Chicago, 1970).
CHAPTER 7

The Madness ofJohn Brown

Was John Brown a heroic martyr-a white man in a racist
society willing to lay down his life on behalfof slaves? Or was he
a madman whose taste for wanton violence propelled the nation
toward avoidable tragedy?

Now that the trial was over, Virginia's governor, Henry Wise, worried
what he would do about John Brown. A state court had recently convicted
Brown of treason, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection, after he led an
attack on Harpers Ferry and its federal arsenal. Now held captive in the
Charles Town jail, Brown faced death by hanging. In the early weeks of
November 1859, mail poured into Wise's office. Some abolitionists swore
they had gathered armies to liberate the great abolitionist. Proslavery writers
threatened to lynch the man who had invaded Virginia with a plan to trigger
a slave insurrection. Like many southerners, Wise worried that Brown was
just the first of many abolitionist fanatics prepared to wage war against the
South and the institution of slavery. He had warned Virginians to take up
arms to defend their state.
Yet among the thousands of correspondents, many northerners condemned
Brown for his violence and dismissed him as an aberration. Fernando Wood,
mayor of New Yark City, urged Wise to grant clemency lest Brown become a
martyr whose execution would deepen passions over the issue of slavery. Other
writers appealed to Wise to show
mercy. Among them were a consider­ Governor Wise recognized that
able number who argued that Brown to declare Brown insane promised
was simply insane. Wise placed the let­ certain political advantages.
ters he received into one of two piles:
"Consider" and "Contemptible Nonsense." The insanity letters went into the
"Consider" pile. Wise recognized that to declare Brown insane promised cer­
tain political advantages. Rather than stand as a hero or a martyr, Brown would
become an object for pity or even scorn.
Certainly the sheer folly of what Brown attempted at Harpers Ferry
gave people reason to question his sanity. For some two months his band
of twenty-one men had hidden in a farmhouse outside the town. They were

148
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 149

idealists, bound together during the tedious waiting by their faith in Brown
and a common hatred of slavery. The group comprised five blacks and six­
teen whites, including three of Brown's sons, Owen, Oliver, and Watson.
Only on the eve of the raid had their leader revealed to them his final plan.
For years Brown had nurtured the idea of striking a blow against slavery. He
planned to move into Harpers Ferry to capture the town and its federal arse­
nal. As his men gathered arms, slaves would pour in from the surrounding
countryside to join their army. Before the local militia had time to organize,
Brown's forces would escape to the nearby hills. From there, they would
fight a guerilla war until the curse of slavery had been exorcised and all slaves
freed from bondage.
An autumn chill filled the air and a light rain fell as the war party made
its way down the dark road toward Harpers Ferry. Three men had remained
behind to handle supplies and arm slaves who took up the fight. A sleepy
stillness covered the small town nestled in the hills where the Shenandoah
joined the Potomac, sixty miles from Washington, D.C. It was a region of
small farms and relatively few slaves. Most likely, the presence of the arsenal
and an armory explains why Brown chose to begin his campaign there.
The attack began without a hitch. Two raiders cut telegraph lines running
east and west from the town. The others seized a rifle works, the armory, and
hostages, including Lewis Washington, the first president's grandson. Along
with Washington's slaves, the raiders appropriated a ceremonial sword given
to George Washington by Frederick the Great of Prussia. For Brown, a
black man brandishing this sword would become a potent symbol of his cru­
sade for liberation and racial equality. Soon the sounds of gunfire drew the
townspeople from their beds. Amid the confusion, the church bell pealed the
alarm dreaded by whites throughout the South-slave insurrection! By late
morning the hastily joined militia and armed farmers had trapped Brown
and his men in the engine house of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One
of Brown's sons had been killed, and another lay dying at his father's side.
Drunken crowds thronged the streets, crying for blood and revenge. When
news of the raid reached Washington, President Buchanan dispatched fed­
eral troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee to put down the insurrection.
Thirty-six hours after the first shot, John Brown's war on slavery ended.
By any calculation the raid had been a total failure. Not a single slave had
risen to join Brown's army. Ten of the raiders lay dead or dying; the rest had
been scattered or captured. Although wounded, Brown had miraculously
escaped death. The commander of the assault force had mistakenly put on
his dress sword, which bent double when he struck Brown, leaving painful
but insubstantial wounds. Seven other people had been killed and nine more
wounded during the raid.
Most historians would agree that the Harpers Ferry raid was to the Civil
War what the Boston Massacre had been to the American Revolution: an
incendiary event. In an atmosphere of aroused passions, profound suspicions,
and irreconcilable differences between abolitionist and proslavery factions,
150 AFTER THE F.ACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

John Brown, man of action: After leading the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas
in 1856, Brown grew a beard to disguise his appearance. His eastern abolitionist
backers were impressed with the aura he radiated as a western man of action.
The image was not hurt by the fact that Brown carried a bowie knife in his boot
and regularly barricaded himself nights in his hotel rooms as a precaution against
proslavery agents.

Brown and his men put a match to the fuse. Once they did their deed and
shed blood, there seemed to be no drawing back for either North or South.
The shouts of angry men overwhelmed the voices of compromise. Across
the North, defenders of national union and of law and order generally con­
demned Brown and his violent tactics. Such northern political leaders as
Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and William Seward spoke out against
him. The Republican Party in 1860 went so far as to adopt a platform cen­
suring the Harpers Ferry raid. At the same time, a group of transcendental
philosophers cast Brown in a noble light. His dignity during his trial and
the force of his convictions inspired Henry David Thoreau to defend him
as a heroic man of action. Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced the raider a
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 151

"saint ...whose martyrdom,if it shall be perfected,will make the gallows as

glorious as the cross." Newspaper editor Horace Greeley called the raid "the
work of a madman," for which he had nothing but the highest admiration.
Moderate northern voices were lost, however, on southern fire-eaters, to
whom all abolitionists and Republicans were potential John Browns.Across
the South angry mobs attacked northerners, regardless of their views on
the slave question. Everywhere the specter of slave insurrection fed fears,
and the uproar strengthened the hand of secessionists, who argued that the
South's salvation lay in expunging all traces of northern influence.

THE MOTIVES OF A FANATIC

And what was Governor Wise to make of the man who triggered all those
passions? Had John Brown foreseen that his quixotic crusade would reap such
a whirlwind of violence? On that issue both his contemporaries and historians
have been sharply divided. Brown himself left a confusing and often contra­
dictory record of his objectives.To his men, and to Frederick Douglass, the
former slave and black abolitionist, Brown made clear he intended nothing
less than to provoke a general slave insurrection.His preparations all pointed
to that goal.He went to Harpers Ferry armed for such a task,and the choice
of the armory as the raid's target left little doubt he intended to equip a slave
army. But throughout the months of preparation, Brown had consistently
warned the coconspirators financing his scheme that the raid might fail. In
that event,he told them,he still hoped the gesture would so divide the nation
that a sectional crisis would ensue,leading to the destruction of slavery.
From his jail cell and at his trial,Brown offered a decidedly contradictory
explanation. Ignoring the weapons he had accumulated, he suggested that
the raid was intended as an extension of the Underground Railroad work he
had previously done.He repeatedly denied any intention to commit violence
or instigate a slave rebellion. "I claim to be here in carrying out a measure
I believe perfectly justifiable," he told a skeptical newspaper reporter, "and
not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those [slaves] suf­
fering great wrong." To Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio,who
asked Brown if he expected a slave uprising, the old man replied, "No sir;
nor did I wish it. I expected to gather them up from time to time and set
them free." In court,with his life hanging in the balance, Brown once again
denied any violent intent. He sought only to expand his campaign for the
liberation of slaves.
Brown's contradictory testimony has provoked much speculation over
the man and his motives. Was he being quite rational and calculating in
abruptly changing his story after capture? Certainly Brown knew how
much his martyrdom would enhance the abolitionist movement.His execu­
tion, he wrote his wife, would "do vastly more toward advancing the cause
I have earnestly endeavored to promote, than all I have done in my life
before." On the other hand, perhaps Brown was so imbued with his own
152 AF:r:EB. THE FACT: THE ART OF HiSTOKICAL DETECTION

John Brown, the impractical idealist: "The old idiot-the quicker they hang him
and get him out of the way, the better." So wrote the editor of a Chicago paper to
Abraham Lincoln. Many contemporaries shared the view of the cartoon reprinted
here, that Brown was a foolish dreamer. Yet Brown had other ideas. "I think you
are fanatical!llt exclaimed one southern bystander after Brown had been captured.
"And I think: you are fanatical," Brown retorted. "'Whom the Gods would destroy
they first made mad,' and you are mad."

righteousness that he deceived himself into believing he had not acted the
part of "incendiary or ruffian" but only meant to aid those slaves "suffering
great wrong." "Poor old man!" commented Republican presidential hope­
ful Salmon Chase. "How sadly misled by his own imaginations!"
Yet for every American who saw Brown as either a calculating insurrec­
tionist or a genuine, if self-deluded, martyr, there were those who thought
him insane. How else could they explain the hopeless assault of eighteen
men against a federal arsenal and the state of Virginia-where slaves were
"not abundant" and where "no Abolitionists were ever known to peep"?
Who but a "madman" (to quote Greeley) could have concocted, much less
attempted, such a wild scheme?
Nor was the issue of john Brown's sanity laid to rest by his execution on
December 2, 1859. Brown had become a symbol, for both North and South,
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 15 3

of the dimensions of the sectional struggle. Inevitably, the question of per­

sonal motivation becomes bound up in historians' interpretations of the root
causes of sectional and social conflict.Was Brown a heroic martyr-a white
man in a racist society with the courage to lay down his life on behalf of his
black brothers and the principles of the Declaration of Independence? Or
was he an emotionally unbalanced fanatic whose taste for wanton violence
propelled the nation toward avoidable tragedy?
During the middle years of the twentieth century, the view of Brown as
an emotional fanatic gained ground.John Garraty, in a popular college sur­
vey text, described Brown as so "deranged " that rather than hang him for his
"dreadful act ... It would have been
For every American who saw far wiser and more just to have com­
mitted him to an asylum." Allen Nev­
Brown as a genuine, if self­
ins defined a middle ground when he
deluded, martyr, there were those
argued that on all questions except
who thought him insane. slavery, Brown could act coherently
and rationally. "But on this special
question of the readiness of slavery to crumble at a blow," Nevins thought,
"his monomania ...or his paranoia as a modern alienist [psychoanalyst] would
define it,rendered him irresponsible."
In 1970 Brown biographer Stephen Oates agreed that in many ways his sub­
ject was not "normal." Yet Oates rejected the idea that insanity could either
be adequately demonstrated or used in any substantive way to explain Brown's
actions. That Brown had an "excitable temperament " and a single-minded
obsession with slavery Oates conceded.He concluded,too,that Brown was ego­
tistical,an overbearing father,an often-inept man worn down by disease and suf­
fering,and a revolutionary who believed himself called to his mission by God.
But having said that,Oates argued that before dismissing Brown as insane,
historians must consider the context of Brown's actions.To call him insane,
Oates argued, "is to ignore the tremendous sympathy he felt for the black
man in America." And, he added, "to label him a 'maniac' out of touch with
'reality' is to ignore the piercing insight he had into what his raid-whether
it succeeded or whether it failed-would do to sectional tensions." More
recently David Reynolds, like Oates, argued persuasively that Brown was
sane. Reynolds viewed the "monomania " some associated with insanity
as a "burning desire to topple slavery in the name of God and American
democracy." What made Brown different was not his vehemence about slav­
ery-most abolitionists shared that passion.But they were almost all racists,
whereas Brown believed in the absolute equality of the races. In the 1850s,
even abolitionists thought that idea was mad.
Given such conflicting views on the question of John Brown's sanity, it
makes sense to examine more closely the evidence of his mental state.As a
last-minute stratagem, Lawson Botts, Brown's attorney, submitted nineteen
affidavits from Brown's friends and acquaintances, purporting to demon­
strate Brown's mental instability.This evidence would seem the most obvi­
ous place to start our inquiry.
154 AYrER THI!. FAcr: Tm ART OP HISTORICAL DETECTION

John Brown, martyr of freedom:

John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die;
And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh,
Then the bold, blue eye grew t.ender, and the harsh face grew mild,
And he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the Negro's child!
John Greenleaf Whittier based this incident in his poem "Brown of Ossawatomie"
(December 1859), on an erroneous newspaper report. Apparently Brown did kiss
the child of a white jailor he had befriended. Brown also remarked to the same
jailer that "he would prefer to be surrounded in his last moments by a poor weeping
slave mother with her children," noting that this "would make the picture at the
gallows complete."

Two major themes appear in those affidavits. First, a number of people

testified to a pronounced pattern ofinsanity in the Brown family, particularly
on his mother's side. In addition to his maternal grandmother and numerous
uncles, aunts, and cousins, Brown's sister, his brother Salmon, his first wife,
 The Madness ef]ohn B'f'O'Dm 155

John Brown, the terrorist:

Mahala Doyle, the wife
ofJames P. Doyle, one of
the men Brown killed at
Pottawatomie, testified of
Brown, "He said if a man
stood between him and
what he considered right, he
would take his life as cooly
as he would eat his breakfast.

His actions show what he

is. Always restless, he seems
never to sleep. With an eye
like a snake, he looks like a
demon."

Dianthe, and his sons Frederick and John Jr. were all said to have shown
evidence of mental disorders. Second, some respondents described certain
patterns of instability they saw in Brown himself. Almost everyone agreed
he was profoundly religious and that he became agitated over the slavery
question. A few traced Brown's insanity back through his years of repeated
business failures. The "wild and desperate" nature of those business schemes
and the rigidity with which he pursued them persuaded several friends of his
"unsound" mind and "monomania."
Many old acquaintances thought that Brown's controversial experiences
in Kansas had unhinged the man. There, in May 1856, proslavery forces
had attacked the antislavery town
Many old acquaintances thought of Lawrence. In retaliation, Brown
that Brown 1 controvenial led a band of seven men (includ­
ing four of his sons) in a midnight
experiences in Kansas had
raid on some proslavery settlers at
unhinged the man.
Pottawatomie Creek:. Although the
Pottawatomie residents had taken
no part in the Lawrence attack, Brown's men, under his orders, took their
broadswords and hacked five of them to death. "Pottawatomie" Brown, as
many people called him after that night of horror, became a figure both vili­
fied for his violence and venerated for his courageous stand against murder­
ous proslave forces. But for Brown, Kansas was only a prelude to his grander
scheme to destroy slavery in the South.
15 6 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

A number of acquaintances testified in 1859 that from the time of the

Pottawatomie killings onward, Brown had been mentally deranged. E. N.
Sill, an acquaintance of both Brown and his father, admitted that he had
once had considerable sympathy for Brown's plan to defend antislavery fam­
ilies in Kansas. "But from his peculiarities," Sill recalled, "I thought Brown
an unsafe man to be commissioned with such a matter." It was Sill who
suggested the idea, which Allen Nevins later adopted, that on the slavery
question alone Brown was insane. "I have no confidence in his judgment in
matters appertaining to slavery," he asserted. "I have no doubt that, upon
this subject . . . he is surely as monomaniac as any inmate in any lunatic
asylum in the country." David King, who talked to Brown after his Kansas
experience, observed that "on the subject of slavery he was crazy" and that
Brown saw himself as "an instrument in the hands of God to free slaves."
Such testimony seems to support the view that Harpers Ferry was the out­
come of insanity. Yet even then, and ever since, many people have rejected
that conclusion. Confronted with the affidavits, Governor Wise thought
to have Brown examined by the head of the state's insane asylums. Upon
reflection he changed his mind. Wise believed Brown perfectly sane and had
even come to admire begrudgingly the old man's "indomitable" spirit. The
governor once described Brown as "the gamest man I ever saw," and for him
that settled the sanity question. "He is," Wise concluded, "a man of clear
head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness." That did not pre­
vent the governor from viewing Brown and his band as "wanton, malicious,
unprovoked felons" deserving of the gallows.
For what it is worth, Brown himself rejected any intimation that he was
anything but sane. He admitted the presence of insanity in his family but
dismissed the issue as "a miserable artifice and pretext." Insane people, he
asserted, "have but little ability to judge of their own sanity." As for him­
self, he was "perfectly unconscious of insanity" and therefore refused "any
attempt to intervene in my behalf on that score." For him, the matter was
both moral and spiritual. Slavery constituted an unethical and unconstitu­
tional assault of one class of citizens against another. Under that assault, acts
that society deemed unlawful-dishonesty, murder, theft, or treason-could
be justified in the name of a higher morality.
Historians have ample reason to doubt the reliability of the Botts evi­
dence. Among those signing the affidavits were friends and relatives who
hoped Governor Wise would spare Brown's life. Might they not have exag­
gerated the instances of mental disorders in his family to make their case
more convincing? Most had not taken Brown's fanaticism seriously until his
raid on Harpers Ferry. Just as important, none of them had any medical
training or experience that would qualify them to determine with any exper­
tise whether Brown or any member of his family could be judged insane.
Only one affidavit came from a doctor, and like most physicians of the day,
he had no particular competence in psychological observation. The "pre­
ponderance" of insanity in Brown's family could have been nothing more
than a series of unrelated disorders.
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 15 7

As Governor Wise understood, the question of Brown's sanity was as

much a political and legal issue as a medical issue. Moderates from both
North and South, seeking to preserve the Union, hoped to soften the divi­
sive impact of Harpers Ferry. If Brown was ruled insane, people would view
him as an aberration rather than the martyr some northerners applauded or
the precursor of abolitionist attacks that southern slaveholders feared. Their
argument that the South would be safe only outside the Union would have
far less force. Even antislavery Republicans tried to dissociate themselves
from Brown's more radical tactics. During the 1859 congressional elections,
the Democrats tried to persuade voters that Harpers Ferry resulted inevi­
tably from the Republicans' appeal to the doctrine of "irresistible conflict"
and "higher law" abolitionism. To blunt such attacks, leading Republicans
regularly attributed the raid to Brown's insanity.
Clearly the affidavits provide no convincing basis for judging the condi­
tion of Brown's mental health. But some historians have argued that the
larger pattern of Brown's life demonstrated his imbalance. Indeed, even the
most generous biographers must admit that Brown botched miserably much
that he attempted to do. In the years before moving to Kansas, Brown had
tried his hand at tanning, sheepherding, surveying, cattle driving, and wool
merchandising-all with unfortunate financial results. By 1852 he had suf­
fered fifteen business failures in four different states. Creditors were con­
tinually hounding him. "Over the years before his Kansas escapade," John
Garraty concluded, "Brown had been a drifter, horse thief and swindler, sev­
eral times a bankrupt, a failure in everything he attempted."
But this evidence, too, must be considered with circumspection. During
the period Brown applied himself in business, the American economy went
through repeated cycles of boom and bust. Many hardworking entrepreneurs
lost their shirts in business despite their best efforts. Brown's failures over
the years may only suggest that he did not have an aptitude for business. His
schemes were usually ill-conceived, and he was too inflexible to adapt to the
rapidly changing business climate. But to show that Brown was a poor busi­
nessman and that much of his life he made foolish decisions hardly proves
him insane. Under those terms, much of the adult population in the United
States would belong in asylums.
Insanity has been widely used as a defense in criminal cases. By demon­
strating that at the time of the crime a client could not distinguish right
from wrong or was incapable of determining the nature of the act commit­
ted, a lawyer can protect the accused from some of the legal consequences
of the act. To find Brown insane, as attorney Botts asked the court, would
have been to assert Brown's inability to understand the consequences of his
actions at Harpers Ferry. The court, much like Governor Wise, determined
that in the legal sense, Brown was fit to stand trial. He may have been unre­
alistic in estimating his chance of success at Harpers Ferry, but he repeat­
edly demonstrated that he knew the consequences of his actions: that he
would be arrested and punished if caught; that large portions of American
society would condemn him; that, nevertheless, he believed himself in the
15 8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

right. In the legal sense, Brown was quite sane and clearheaded about his
actions. Indeed the passion and power of his words in the courtroom won
him admirers across the North.

MADNESS OR GENIUS?
Yet the court's judgment, accurate as it may have been, leaves us uneasy.
To have Brown pronounced sane or insane, in addition to guilty or not
guilty, does little to explain, deep down, why the man acted as he did. What
drove John Brown to crusade against slavery? To execute in cold blood five
men along a Kansas creek? To lead twenty-one men to Harpers Ferry? To
fail to escape before the militia trapped him? Many abolitionists, though
they abhorred the institution of slavery, were pacifists who rejected vio­
lence. John Brown was one of the few who acted with such vehemence. In
that sense he was far from being a normal American-far, even, from being
a normal abolitionist. How can we begin to understand the intensity of his
convictions?
Here we approach the limits of explanations based on rational motives.
To describe John Brown simply by referring to his professed and undoubt­
edly sincere antislavery ideology is to leave unexplored the fire in the man.
Such an approach assumes too easily that consciously expressed motives can
be taken at face value. Yet we have already seen, in the case of the bewitched
at Salem, that unconscious motivations often play important roles in human
behavior. If we are willing to grant that apparently "normal" people some­
times act for reasons beyond those they consciously express, how much more
likely is it that we must go beyond rational motives in understanding Brown?
It seems only logical that historians should bring to bear the tools of modern
psychology to assess the man's personality.
Indeed, a subbranch of history has applied such methods to a wide variety
of historical problems. Known as psychohistory, this approach at first drew
on the discipline of psychoanalysis
pioneered by Sigmund Freud, an "Experience plays a far smaller
Austrian physician who propounded role in the development of major
his theories during the early twen­ mental illness than does biology. "
tieth century. Psychoanalysts and
the historians who followed them located states of mind in their subjects'
life experiences and the circumstances that shaped them. They ignored the
extent to which mental disorders are biologically rooted and inheritable. As
psychologist Kenneth Carroll put it, mental health experts now generally
agree, "experience plays a far smaller role in the development of major men­
tal illness than does biology."
Although John Brown never underwent a psychological examination, suf­
ficient evidence exists to provide us, as it happens, with the means of con­
ducting one ourselves. In that light, the affidavits take on a new significance.
Rather than wonder if they reveal a pattern of insanity, we can ask if they
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 15 9

reveal patterns of behavior that reflect a clinically recognized mental disorder.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have codified their rules for evaluating behav­
ior in what is known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders
(4th ed.), commonly known as the DSM-IV. The DSM-IV provides a means
to distinguish between behaviors that are normal and those that are symptoms
of a mental illness.
Here illness is a critical term, because it denotes a medical condition. In
that sense, psychologists recognize that what they deem as pathological
behaviors are symptoms of a disease. They do not base their diagnoses on
personal interpretation or belief. Through research, clinical experience, and
observations, they have reached a consensus that certain symptoms are asso­
ciated with widely recognized mental disorders. The DSM-IV reflects that
consensus. Unlike psychoanalysis, with its complex theories of personality,
the medical model does not seek to explain why pathological symptoms exist;
it only asks whether they do exist.
Psychologist Kenneth Carroll undertook just such an examination of the
affidavits. While Carroll recognized the presence of bias and subjectivity
among those testifying to Brown's insanity, he discovered a consistent pat­
tern in their observations. First, they identified the widespread mental dis­
orders among Brown's immediate family and relatives. Carroll understood
that the presence of those disorders in no way indicated that Brown, himself,
suffered from them. All the same, it does make it more likely that commonly
recurring symptoms over the course of his life did in fact indicate a mental
disorder.
Almost all the affidavits describe a man subject to mood swings, easily
excited on more issues than slavery, persuaded of the rightness and rectitude
of his own opinions, inflexible, and given to unrealistic expectations. His
brother-in-law, Milton Lusk, for example, described Brown as "disposed to
enter on wild and desperate projects and adventures, and incapable of delib­
eration or reasoning." His cousin, Gideon Mills, suggested Brown had been
"subject to periods of insanity especially when from any cause his mind has
been fixed for any length of time on any subject." George Leach, a lifelong
friend who first met Brown as a young boy, commented that on "any subject
and from any cause his mind was brought to dwell upon," Brown became
"greatly excited" and "liable to attacks of mania." Another friend reported
that "on the subject of slavery he [Brown] was crazy-he was armed to the
teeth and remarked among other things that he was 'an instrument in the
hands of God to free the slaves."'
Had these various people exaggerated their impressions in order to per­
suade the court of Brown's unfitness to stand trial? Carroll thought not. None
of those who signed affidavits mentioned bizarre behaviors, mad episodes, or
lunacy to embellish their impressions. Indeed, Carroll found reference to
no symptoms that contradict accepted psychological diagnosis. Further, the
affidavits offer no evidence that Brown suffered from any mental retarda­
tion, dementia, hallucinations, or thought disorders. Carroll thus concluded
that Brown was not schizophrenic, nor did he manifest the compulsive and
160 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

repetitive behaviors associated with obsessive-compulsives. Several affiants

did use the term "mania," and that is the diagnosis Carroll chose. Brown was
manic or manic-depressive, hence suffering from what psychologists call a
bipolar disorder.
The DSM-IV provides useful criteria for judging this condition, among
them:

A. A distinct period of abnormality and abnormally elevated, expansive, or

elevated mood, lasting at least one week.

B. During the period of mood disturbance three (or more) of the following
symptoms . . . have been present to a significant degree:

1. inflated self-esteem or grandiosity

2. decreased need for sleep
3. more talkative than usual, or pressure to keep talking
4. flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
5. distractibility (i.e., attention too often drawn to unimportant or irrelevant
external stimuli)
6. increase in goal-directed activities . . . or psychomotor agitation
7. excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for
painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual
indiscretions, or foolish investments)

From what we know so far of Brown, most, if not all, of these symptoms
were evident in his behavior. His many business failures, his refusal to con­
sider advice from friends who challenged his plans, his deep sense of a God­
ordained mission, and his ability to go for long periods without much sleep
are all elements of a manic personality.
Often, too, are bouts of depression, and we have available a remarkable
document to explore in order to learn if Brown did experience intermittent
depressive moods. Better yet, unlike the affidavits that express the views of
others, this document comes from Brown's own hand. At the age of fifty­
seven, he wrote a long letter to a thirteen-year-old boy named Harry Stearns.
Harry was the son of one of Brown's wealthiest financial patrons. In the let­
ter, Brown told the story of "a certain boy of my acquaintance" who, "for
convenience," he called John. This name was especially convenient, because
the boy was none other than Brown himself. The letter is one of the few sur­
viving sources of information about Brown's childhood. It is reprinted here
with only a few omissions of routine biographical data.

I can not tell you of anything in the :first Four years of John's life worth men­
tioning save that at that early age he was tempted by Three large Brass Pins
belonging to a girl who lived in the family & stole them. In this he was detected
by his Mother; & after having a full day to think of the wrong; received from
her a thorough whipping. When he was Five years old his Father moved to
Ohio; then a wilderness :filled with wild beasts, & Indians. During the long
journey, which was performed in part or mostly with an ox-team; he was called
on by turns to assist a boy Five years older (who had been adopted by his
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 161

Father & Mother) & learned to think he could accomplish smart things by
driving the Cows; & riding the horses. Sometimes he met with Rattle Snakes
which were very large; & which some of the company generally managed to
kill. After getting to Ohio in 1805 he was for some time rather afraid of the
Indians, & of their Rifles; but this soon wore off: & he used to hang about
them quite as much as was consistent with good manners; & learned a trifle
of their talk. His father learned to dress Deer Skins, & at 6 years old John was
installed a young Buck Skin. He was perhaps rather observing as he ever after
remembered the entire process of Deer Skin dressing; so that he could at any
time dress his own leather such as Squirel, Raccoon, Cat, Wolf and Dog Skins,
and also learned to make Whip Lashes, which brought him some change at
times, & was of considerable service in many ways. At Six years old he began
to be a rambler in the wild new country finding birds and squirrels and some­
times a wild Turkey's nest. But about this period he was placed in the school of
adversity; which my young friend was a most necessary part of his early train­
ing.You may laugh when you come to read about it; but these were sore trials to
John: whose earthly treasures were very few & small. These were the beginning
of a severe but much needed course of discipline which he afterwards was to pass
through; & which it is to be hoped has learned him before this time that the
Heavenly Father sees it best to take all the little things out of his hands which
he has ever placed in them. When John was in his Sixth year a poor Indian boy
gave him a Yellow Marble the first he had ever seen. This he thought a great
deal of; & kept it a good while; but at last he lost it beyond recovery. It took
years to heal the wound & I think he cried at times about it. About Five months
after this he caught a young Squirrel tearing off his tail in doing it; & getting
severely bitten at the same time himself. He however held on to the little bob
tail Squirrel; & finally got him perfectly tamed, so that he almost idolized his
pet. This too he lost; by its wandering away; or by getting killed; & for a year or
two John was in mourning; and looking at all the Squirrels he could see to try &
discover Bobtail, ifpossible. I must not neglect to tell you of a very bad and fool­
ish habbit to which John was somewhat addicted. I mean telling lies; generally
to screen himself from blame; or from punishment. He could not well endure
to be reproached; & I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely
frank; by making frankness a kind of atonement for some of his faults; he would
not have been so often guilty of this fault; nor have been (in after life) obliged
to struggle so long with so mean a habit.
John was never quarelsome; but was excessively fond of the hardest & rough­
est kind of plays; & could never get enough [ofJ them. Indeed when for a short
time he was sometimes sent to School the opportunity it afforded to wrestle
& Snow ball & run & jump & knock off old seedy Wool hats; offered to him
almost the only compensation for the confinement, & restraints of school. I
need not tell you that with such a feeling & but little chance of going to school
at all: he did not become much of a schollar. He would always choose to stay
at home & work hard rather than be sent to school; & during the warm sea­
son might generally be seen barefooted & bareheaded: with Buck skin Breeches
suspended often with one leather strap over his shoulder but sometimes with
162 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Two. To be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable dis­
tances was particularly his delight; & in this he was often indulged so that by
the time he was Twelve years old he was sent off more than a Hundred Miles
with companies of cattle; & he would have thought his character much injured
had he been obliged to be helped in any such job.This was a boyish kind of
feeling but characteristic however.
At Eight years old, John was left a Motherless boy which loss was com­
plete and pearmanent for notwithstanding his Father again married to a sen­
sible, intelligent, and on many accounts a very estimable woman; yet he never
adopted her in feeling; but continued to pine after his own Mother for years.
This opperated very unfavorably upon him; as he was both naturally fond of
females; &, withall, extremely diffident; & deprived him of a suitable con­
necting link between the different sexes; the want of which might under some
circumstances, have proved his ruin....
During the war with England [in 1812] a circumstance occured that in
the end made him a most determined Abolitionist: & led him to declare, or
Swear: Eternal war with Slavery. He was staying for a short time with a very
gentlemanly landlord since a United States Marshall who held a slave boy
near his own age very active, inteligent and good feeling; & to whom John
was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The
master made a great pet ofJohn: brought him to table with his first company;
& friends; called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did: &
to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home with a com­
pany of cattle alone; while the negro boy (who was fully if not more than his
equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed; & lodged in cold weather; & beaten before
his eyes with Iron Shovels or any other thing that came first to hand. This
brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless &
Motherless slave children: for such children have neither Fathers or Mothers to
protect, & provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question is God
their Father? ...
I had like to have forgotten to tell you of one ofJohn's misfortunes which
set rather hard on him while a young boy.He had by some means perhaps by
gift of his father become the owner of a little Ewe Lamb which did finely
till it was about Two Thirds grown; & then sickened & died.This brought
another protracted mourning season: not that he felt the pecuniary loss so
much: for that was never his disposition; but so strong & earnest were his
attachments.
John had been taught from earliest childhood to "fear God and keep his
commandments;" & though quite skeptical he had always by turns felt much
serious doubt as to his future well being; & about this time became to some
extent a convert to Christianity & ever after a firm believer in the divine
authenticity of the Bible.With this book he became very familiar, & possessed
a most unusual memory of its entire contents.
Now some of the things I have been telling of; were just such as I would
recommend to you: & I would like to know that you had selected these out;
& adopted them as part of your own plan of life; & I wish you to have some
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 163

deffinite plan. Many seem to have none; & others never stick to any that they
do form. This was not the case with John. He followed up with tenacity what­
ever he set about so long as it answered his general purpose; & hence he rarely
failed in some good degree to effect the things he undertook. This was so
much the case that he habitually expected to succeed in his undertakings. With
this feeling should be coupled; the consciousness that our plans are right in
themselves.
During the period I have named, John had acquired a kind of ownership to
certain animals of some little value but as he had come to understand that the
title of minors might be a little imperfect: he had recourse to various means in
order to secure a more independent; & perfect right of property. One of those
means was to exchange with his Father for something of far less value. Another
was by trading with others persons for something his Father had never owned.
Older persons have some times found difficulty with titles.
From Fifteen to Twenty years old, he spent most of his time working at the
Tanner & Currier's trade keeping Bachelors hall; & he officiating as Cook; &
for most of the time as foreman of the establishment under his Father. During
this period he found much trouble with some of the bad habits I have men­
tioned & with some that I have not told you off: his conscience urging him
forward with great power in this matter: but his close attention to business; &
success in its management, together with the way he got along with a company
of men, & boys; made him quite a favorite with the serious & more inteligent
portion of older persons. This was so much the case; & secured for him so
many little notices from those he esteemed; that his vanity was very much
fed by it: & he came forward to manhood quite full of self-conceit; & self­
confident; notwithstanding his extreme bashfulness. A younger brother used
sometimes to remind him of this: & to repeat to him this expression which you
may somewhere find, "A King against whom there is no rising up." The habit
so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in after life too much disposed
to speak in an imperious or dictating way. From Fifteen years & upward he felt
a good deal of anxiety to learn; but could only read & studdy a little; both for
want of time; & on account of inflammation of the eyes. He however managed
by the help of books to make himself tolerably well acquainted with common
arithmetic; & Surveying; which he practiced more or less after he was Twenty
years old.

Before exploring the letter's psychological clues, it may be worth remind­

ing ourselves what a straightforward reading of the document provides.
Attention would first center on Brown's religious nature. His writing style
is much influenced by the Bible. He was all his life a fervent Puritan who
as a child "learned to fear God and his commandments" and accepted the
"divine authenticity of the Bible" whose contents he had committed to
memory. Such religiosity was certainly common in Brown's day. We should
note, however, his intense and unquestioning faith. He refers to the loss of
some precious objects in his youth as "the beginning of a severe but much
needed course of discipline." And to what did Brown attribute his string of
164 APTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

John Brown, the kinclly

&th.er: Brown's daughter Ruth
remembered the following
incident from her childhood:
"When I first began to go to
school, I found a piece of calico
one day behind one of the
benches,-it was not large, but
seemed quite a treasure to me,
and I did not show it to any one
until I got home. Father heard
me then telling about it, and said,
'Don't you know what girl lost
it?' I told him I did not. 'Well,
when you go to school tomorrow
take it with you, and find out if
you can who lost it. It is a trifling
thing, but always remember that
if you should lose anything you
valued, no matter how small,
you would want the person that
found it to give it back to you.'"

misfortune? To God, "the Heavenly Father [who] sees it best to take all the
little things out of his hands which he has ever placed in them." Those who
do not share Brown's harsh Calvinist faith might find his religious funda­
mentalism a form of mental disorder. Most of Brown's contemporaries, even
those who worshipped a gentler God, would have respected his beliefs, even
if they did not fully share them.
A second, even more striking element of the letter naturally centers on
Brown's tale of how, as a twelve-year-old, he was first roused to oppose slav­
ery. Shocked by the cruel treatment of his young black friend, John was
further incensed by the unfair and contrasting treatment from which he ben­
efited simply because he was white. This vivid, emotional experience seems
to go a good way toward explaining why the evil of slavery weighed so heavily
on Brown's mind. In an essay on the motivations behind the raid at Harpers
Ferry, this anecdote is quite clearly the major piece of evidence in the letter.
The additional material on Brown's childhood, which often seems to ramble
incoherently, might be included in a book-length biography of Brown but
hardly seems relevant to an article that must quickly get to the heart of the
man's involvement with abolition.
Yet when we look more closely, Brown's story of the mistreated young
slave does not explain much about Brown's motives. In a land where slavery
was central to the culture, hundreds, even thousands, of young white boys
must have had experiences in which black playmates were unf.rirly whipped,
degraded, and treated as inferiors. Nonetheless, many of those boys went on
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 165

to become slaveholders. Furthermore, although some undoubtedly developed

a strong dislike of slavery (Abraham Lincoln among them*), none felt com­
pelled to mount the kinds of campaigns Brown did in Kansas and at Harpers
Ferry. "Why did Brown's rather commonplace experience make such a strong
impression on him?
The answer to that question may be learned if we do not dismiss the other
portions of Brown's childhood experiences as irrelevant but instead exam­
ine them for clues to his psychological development. So let us turn, for a
moment, from a direct examination of Brown's abolitionism to the other
elements of the letter to Harry Stearns. In doing so we must consider each
of Brown's stories, illustrations, and comments with care, keeping in mind
the characteristics of bipolar disorders outlined in the DSM-IV. In previ­
ous chapters we have seen that historians must always treat primary sources
skeptically, identifying the personal perspectives and biases that may influ­
ence the writer. Psychological theory requires us to take that skepticism
one step further, assuming not only that the evidence may be influenced by
unstated motivations (such as Brown's wishing to impress Harry Stearns's
father with his virtue) but also that some, even the most powerful of Brown's
motivations, may be unconscious-hidden even from Brown himself.
At first glance the narrative appears to recount to his reader a life full
of pioneering adventure. Brown faced rattlesnakes, befriended Indians, and
learned to tan deerskins. Other details address fairly ordinary events in a
child's life. "Who, after all, has not cried one time or another at the loss of a
pet, or has not been proud of accomplishments like driving cows and riding
horses? Yet we must remember that these events are only a few selected from
among thousands in Brown's childhood, events meaningful enough to him
that he remembered and related them more than fifty years later. "Why did
Brown retain these memories rather than others? "What suggestive images
and themes recur? Because Brown remembered them so vividly later in life,
we may assume that these were for him life-defining experiences.
One overriding theme is a recurring sense of loss. Brown recalls the yel­
low marble he valued so much, his pet squirrel, and the ewe lamb he raised
with great affection. All of these he
One overriding theme is a lost, but none pained him so much as
recurring sense ofloss. the death of his mother. Of his two
parents, she is the more visible in this
letter, and it is clear that Brown loved her dearly. Notice the language describ­
ing his mother's death. "John was left a Motherless boy," he writes-not the
simpler and less revealing, "John's mother died," which places the emphasis
on the mother rather than on the loss incurred by the "Motherless boy."
Periods of mourning followed all these events. Of his prize marble he
recalls, "It took years to heal the wound & I think he cried at times about it."
The disappearance of his pet squirrel led to a similar period of mourning.

* As a young man, Lincoln was reputed to have been strongly moved by the sight of slaves being
auctioned in New Orleans.
166 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

What strikes the reader is not Brown's feelings. Almost everyone has had
similar feelings at some time. Rather, in Brown's case, it is the duration and
intensity of these periods of grieving. They strike the reader as a potential
sign of depression. Especially in the case of his mother, the loss was "com­
plete and pearmanent." Brown admits he never grew to love his new mother
and "continued to pine after his own Mother for years." As Kenneth Carroll
noted, where mania is often publicly expressed, depression is more likely
a private matter in which a person withdraws into himself or herself. As a
consequence, friends and acquaintances may be less aware of its presence.
Brown, in other instances, expressed a "steady strong desire to die" and cer­
tainly made no attempt to save his life when he faced execution. Whether
or not he did suffer from depression is not essential to a diagnosis of bipo­
lar disorder. Nonetheless, it expands our understanding of the man and his
motives for attacking Harpers Ferry.
The letter to Stearns does suggest other elements of the DSM-IV diag­
nosis for mania. One key symptom is "inflated self-esteem or grandiosity."
Brown admits to an "imperious or dictating way" that a younger brother
summed up as "A King against whom there is no rising up." According to
his brother, Brown could be a tyrant. Brown speaks also of being a "favor­
ite" among older persons he esteemed so much so "that his vanity was very
much fed by it: & he came forward to manhood quite full of self-conceit; &
self-confident; notwithstanding his extreme bashfulness." What he meant
by his "bashfulness" is difficult to determine. Yet he goes on to say that he
"followed up with tenacity whatever he set about" and then concludes, "he
rarely failed in some good degree to effect the things he undertook." That
must strike us as a rather remarkable claim from a person whose life was
beset by endless business failures and personal loss. It certainly smacks of
"inflated self-esteem." So, too, does the following assertion, "This was so
much the case that he habitually expected to succeed in his undertakings."
As we have seen, even the event that defined his life's great success, Harpers
Ferry, began as a fiasco.
Recall as well that many of those signing affidavits mentioned Brown's
unwillingness to alter his views or change his plans when confronted with
contradictory advice. He asserts that his expectations for success "should be
coupled" with "the consciousness that our plans are right in themselves."
This sense of carrying out a divinely ordained mission is consistent with
Brown's deep religious convictions, but it also suggests rigidity in his behav­
ior and the grandiosity of one who assumes he has a monopoly on the truth.
So strong were these feelings that Brown admitted that as a youth he fre­
quently told lies, "generally to screen himself from blame; or from punish­
ment." Why? Because "He could not well endure to be reproached." Brown,
in short, admits that he could not stand to be criticized.
One final criterion from the DSM-IV seems to be present. Brown
describes himself as "excessively fond of the hardest & roughest kind of plays;
& could never get enough [of] them." Rather than seize the opportunity
school afforded to improve himself, Brown preferred "to wrestle & Snow
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 167

John Brown, the stem father: Brown was influenced in his harsh discipline by his
father, Owen (left), and in tum influenced his own son, John Jr. (right). Father John
kept a detailed account book of young John's sinful acts, along with the nwnber of
whiplashes each sin deserved. Even sins, it seemed, were carefully enumerated as
property.

ball & run & jump & knock off old seedy Wool hats; [that] offered to him
almost the only compensation for the confinement, & restraints of school."
The DSM-IV mentions psychomotor agitation and "excessive involvement
in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences."
Brown's hyperactivity might have meant physical injury to himself or others,
expulsion from school, or academic failure.
Does all this evidence thus prove that Brown was bipolar? It certainly
suggests that might have been the case. Still, we cannot be convinced our
diagnosis is correct. The evidence is simply too fragmentary to lead us to a
certain conclusion. We can only say with confidence that all the evidence
is consistent with a diagnosis of a bipolar disorder. But that in turn forces
us to ask a more important question: How does that diagnosis better help
us explain John Brown and his motives? Many historians, such as Brown
biographer Stephen Oates, would argue that to label Brown as mentally ill
does a grave disservice to the man and his cause. It demeans the extraor­
dinary sympathy he felt for African Americans as either slaves or human
beings.John Brown, for Oates as well as David Reynolds, was a rare Ameri­
can who rejected the racism of both northern abolitionists and southern
slaveholders.
Psychologists might answer that the righteousness of his cause and
his mental health are two different matters. Mental illnesses, they insist,
168 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

are "well-known, well-described, clinically significant, and scientifically

legitimate entities that have maintained their integrity over time, place, and
culture." A bipolar disorder manifests similar symptoms, whether in the Vir­
ginia of the 1850s or of the twenty-first century. As a result, the more impor­
tant question is not whether Brown was or wasn't mentally ill but whether
Brown would have attacked Harpers Ferry had he not been bipolar. The
answer Carroll suggests is "probably not." A mentally healthy person would
have been less likely to fail so often in business, to travel so widely seeking
success, or to launch a grand scheme to liberate slaves. As Carroll concludes,
"In short, he might have been an ordinary man." Brown, we know, whether
a success or a failure, a madman or a saint, was in no sense ordinary. Many
of history's heroes, inventors, and artists have shared Brown's mental condi­
tion. To label them bipolar in no way diminishes the record of their achieve­
ments. Rather, we recognize that at critical moments they poured their manic
energy into creative channels. In the process, they forced us to revise our
reality and move in new directions. The consequences have not always been
positive or constructive, as the Adolf Hitlers of the world remind us. Nor
do periods of creative success protect these geniuses from painful episodes
of psychosis that often follow manic outbursts. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great
American author, seldom drank when he was writing. He lost himself in
alcohol when he lacked the intense energy he needed to create new work.
So it was for John Brown. At the moment he transcended his life of fail­
ure, he forced his generation to identify either positively or negatively with
the action he took to liberate black
Americans. His act of violence was Brown forced his generation
appropriate to what Oates described to identify either positively or
as "the violent, irrational, and para­ negatively with the action he took
doxical times in which he lived."
to liberate black Americans.
Given Brown's bipolar condition,
expressed through his profoundly religious nature and passionate commit­
ment to human liberty and equality, he could not be at peace so long as
his society refused to recognize the contradiction between its religious and
political ideals and the existence of slavery.
In the end, John Brown turned the tables on society. The man who struck
so many friends and acquaintances as simply mad and out of control forced
society to confront his view of the historical moment. After Harpers Ferry,
his fellow Americans had to consider whether it was not actually their val­
ues, and society's, that were immoral and "abnormal." The outbreak of civil
war, after all, demonstrated that American society was so maladjusted and so
divided that it could not remain a "normal," integrated whole without vio­
lently purging itself. If Brown's raid was an isolated act of a disturbed man,
why did it drive an entire generation to the brink of war? Why did Brown's
generation find it impossible to agree about the meaning of Harpers Ferry?
As C. Vann Woodward concluded, the importance lay not so much in the
man or the event, but in the use made of them by northern and southern
 The Madness ofJohn Brown 169

partisans. For every Emerson or Thoreau who pronounced the raid the
work of a saint, a southern fire-eater condemned the venture as the villainy
of all northerners.
None of these actors in the historical drama paid much attention to evi­
dence. A crisis mentality thwarted any attempts at understanding or recon­
ciliation. In the fury of mutual recrimination, both sides lost sight of the man
who had provoked the public outcry and propelled the nation toward war. In
such times it will always be, as abolitionist Wendell Phillips remarked, "hard
to tell who's mad."
17 0 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

The current version of this chapter draws heavily on two fine works of his­
torical analysis. The first is David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New
York, 2005). Reynolds firmly rejects any notion that Brown was insane.
Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman gathered a group of scholars to recon­
sider John Brown. Their edited collection, Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy
ofJohn Brown (Athens, Ohio 2005), includes an essay by Kenneth Carroll,
"A Psychological Examination of John Brown," that informed our under­
standing of mental disorders. Carroll deftly mixes historical evidence and
psychological evidence. For additional perspectives, see Paul Finkelman, ed.,
His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry
Raid (Charlottesville, VA, 1995), in particular the essays by Bertram Wyatt­
Brown (pp. 10-40) and Robert E. McGlone, who discusses the political con­
siderations of contemporaries' debates about Brown's sanity (pp. 213-252).
McGlone has also published John Brown's War Against Slavery (New York,
2009), which appeared too late to incorporate into this chapter.
A valuable earlier biography on John Brown is Stephen Oates, To Purge
This Land with Blood (New York, 1970). Oates's treatment is evenhanded,
scholarly, and stirring in its narrative. (Other modern biographies include
studies by Jules C. Abels and Richard 0. Boyer, both published during the
1970s.) C. Vann Woodward's "John Brown's Private War" is one of the best
short interpretive essays available on the raid and can be found in his Bur­
den of Southern History (Baton Rouge, LA, 1968). For a detailed account of
Brown's earlier doings in Kansas, see James C. Malin, John Brown and the
Legacy of Fifty-Six (Philadelphia, 1942). Brown's relationship with his con­
spirators is grippingly told in Edward]. Renehan Jr., The Secret Six: The True
Tale ofthe Men Who Conspired with John Brown (New York, 1995). Franklin B.
Sanborn, The Life and Letters ofJohn Brown (Boston, 1891), an older biogra­
phy unabashedly sympathetic to Brown, contains many valuable personal let­
ters. The fullest collection of materials on the raid and trial is R. M. De Witt,
The Life, Trial, and Execution ofJohn Brown (New York, 1859).
CHAPTER 8

The View from the Bottom Rail

How can we know anything about newly freed slaves who left
behind few written records? Oral evidence provides one answer.

Thunder. From across the swamps and salt marshes of the Carolina coast
came the distant, repetitive pounding. Thunder out of a clear blue sky. Down
at the slave quarters, young Sam Mitchell heard the noise and wondered. In
Beaufort, the nearby village, planter John Chaplin heard too, and dashed
for his carriage. The drive back to his plantation was as quick as Chaplin
could make it. Once home, he ordered his wife and children to pack; then
he looked for his slaves. The flatboat must be made ready, he told them; the
family was going to Charleston. He needed eight men at the oars. One of
the slaves, Sam Mitchell's father, brought the news to his wife and son at
the slave quarters. "You ain't gonna row no boat to Charleston," the wife
snapped, "you go out dat back door and keep agoing." Young Sam was mys­
tified by all the commotion. How could it thunder without a cloud in the
sky? "Son, dat ain't no t'under," explained the mother, "dat Yankee come to
gib you freedom."
The pounding of the guns came relatively quickly to Beaufort-November
1861, only seven months after the first hostilities at Fort Sumter. Yet it was
only a matter of time before the thunder of freedom rolled across the rest
of the South, from the bayous and deltas of Louisiana in 1862 to the farms
around Richmond in 1865. As the guns of the Union spoke, thousands of Sam
Mitchells experienced their own unforgettable moments. Freedom was com­
ing to a nation of four million slaves.
To most slaves, the men in the blue coats were foreigners-and sometimes
suspect. Many southern masters painted the prospect of northern invasion in
lurid colors. Union soldiers, one Tennessee slave was told, "got long horns
on their heads, and tushes [pointed teeth] in their mouths, and eyes sticking
out like a cow! They're mean old things." A fearful Mississippi slave refused
to come out of a tree until the Union soldier below her took off his cap and
demonstrated he had no horns. Many slaves, however, scoffed at such tales.
"We all hear 'bout dem Yankees," a Carolina slave told his overseer. "Folks

171
172 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF liISTOBlCAL DETECTION

This slave family lived on a plantation at Beaufort, South Carolina, not far from
the plantation where Sam Mitchell heard the thunder of northern guns in 1861.
The photograph was ta.ken after northern forces had occupied the Sea Islands area.

tell we they has horns and a tail.... Wen I see dem coming I shall run like
all possess." But as soon as the overseer fled, leaving the plantation in the
slaves' care, the tune changed: "Good-by, ole man, good-by.That's right.
Skedaddle as fast as you kin.... We's gwine to run sure enough; but we
knows the Yankees, an' we runs that way."
For some slaves, the bond of loyalty or the fear of alternatives led them to
side with their masters.Faithful slaves hid valuable silver, persuaded Yankees
that their departed masters were Union sympathizers, or pretended they had
a contagious illness in order to scare off marauding soldiers. But in many
cases, the conflict between loyalty and freedom caused anguish.A Georgia
couple, both more than sixty years old, greeted Sherman's soldiers calmly
and with apparent lack of interest.They seemed content to remain with their
master instead of joining the slaves flocking along behind Union troops.As
the soldiers prepared to leave, however, the old woman suddenly stood up, a
"fierce, almost devilish " look in her eyes. "What you sit dar for?" she asked
her husband vehemently."You s'pose I wait sixty years for nutten?Don't yer
see de door open? l'se follow my child; I not stay.Yes, anudder day I goes
'long wid dese people; yes, sar, I walks till I drop in my tracks."
 The View from the Bottom Rail 173

Other slaves felt no hesitation about choosing freedom; indeed, they

found it difficult to contain their joy. One woman, who overheard the news
of emancipation just before she was to serve her master's dinner, asked to be
excused to get water from a nearby spring. Once there, and out of sight, she
allowed her feelings free rein.

I jump up and scream, "Glory, glory hallelujah to Jesus! I'se free! I'se free!
Glory to God, you come down an' free us; no big man could do it." An' I got
sort o' scared, afeared somebody hear me, an' I takes another good look, an'
fall on de goun' an' roll over, an' kiss de gound' fo' de Lord's sake, I's so full o'
praise to Masser Jesus.

To newly freed slaves, it seemed the world had turned upside down. Rich
and powerful masters were fleeing, while freed slaves were left with the run
of the plantation. The situation was summed up by one black soldier who
was surprised-and delighted-to find his former master among the prison­
ers he was guarding. "Hello, massa!" he said cheerfully, "bottom rail top dis
time!"

RECOVERING THE FREEDPEOPLE's PoINT

OF VIEW
The freeing of four million black slaves ranks as one of the major events in
American history. Yet the story has not been easy to tell. To understand the
personal trials and triumphs of the newly liberated slaves, or "freedpeople"
as they have come to be called,* historians must draw on the personal expe­
riences of those at the center of the drama. They must recreate the freed­
people's point of view. But slaves had occupied the lowest level of America's
social and economic scale. They sat, as the black soldier correctly noted, on
the bottom rail of the fence. For several reasons, that social reality has made
it more difficult to recover the freedpeople's point of view.
In the first place, most traditional histories suffered from a natural "top­
rail" bias, writing primarily about members of the higher social classes. His­
tories cannot be written without primary-source material, and by and large,
those on the top rails of society have produced the most records. Having
been privileged to receive an education, members of the middle and upper
classes are more apt to publish memoirs, keep diaries, or write letters. As
leaders of society who make decisions, they are the subjects of official min­
utes and records.
At the other end of the social spectrum, ordinary folk lead lives that are
less documented. While political leaders involve themselves in one momen­
tous issue after another, the work of farmers and laborers is often repetitive

* White contemporaries of the newly freed slaves referred to them as freedmen. More recently, histo­
rians have preferred the gender-neutral termfreedpeople, which we will use here except when quoting
primary sources.
174 An'ER THE FACT: THE ART OF HlSTORICAL DETECTION

"Git away from dat dar fence white man or I'll make Old Abe's Gun smoke
at you. I can hardly hold de ball back now.-De bottom rails on top now." More
than one former slave used the image of the "bottom rail on top" to define the
transformation wrought by the Civil War. This watercolor sketch was made by
a Confederate soldier being held prisoner by Union forces at Point Lookout,
Maryland.

and appears to have little effect on the course of history. The decade of the
1970s, howeve r, saw an increasing interest in the lives of ordinary people. In
Chapter 2, for example, we saw that appreciating the social and economic
position of the serving class was essential to understanding the volatile soci­
ety of early Virginia. Similarly, in Chapter 3 we turned to the social tensions
of ordinary farmers in order to explore the alliances behind the witchcraft
controversy at Salem.
Reconstructing the perspective of enslaved African Americans has proved
particularly challenging. Before the Civil War, slaves were not only discour­
aged from learning to read and write, southern legislature s passed slave codes
that flatly forbade whites to teach them. The laws were not entirely effec­
tive. A few blacks employed as drivers on large plantations learned to read
and correspond so that their absent masters might send them instructions.
Some black preachers were also literate. Still, most reading remained a fur­
tive affair, done out of sight of the master or other whites. During the war,
 The View from the Bottom Rail 175

a literate slave named Squires Jackson was eagerly scanning a newspaper for
word of northern victories when his master unexpectedly entered the room
and demanded to know what the slave was doing. The surprised reader deftly
turned the newspaper upside down, put on a foolish grin, and said, "Confed­
erates done won the war!" The master laughed and went about his business.
Even though most slaves never wrote letters, kept diaries, or left other
written records, it might at first seem possible to learn about slave life from
accounts written by white contemporaries. Any number of letters, books,
travelers' accounts, and diaries survive, after all-full of descriptions of life
under slavery and of the experiences of freedpeople after the war. Yet the
question of perspective raises serious problems. The vantage point of white
Americans observing slavery was emphatically not that of slaves who lived
under the "peculiar institution."
Consider, first, the observations of those whites who associated most
closely with black slaves: their masters. The relationship between master and
slave was inherently unequal. Slaves could be whipped for trifling offenses;
they could be sold or separated
With slaves so dependent on the from their families and closest
friends; even under "kind" mas­
master's authority, they were hardly
ters, they were bound to labor
likely to reveal their true feelings to as ordered if they wanted their
their owners ration of food and clothing.
With slaves so dependent on the
master's authority, they were hardly likely to reveal their true feelings; the
dangerous consequences of doing so were too great.
In fact, we have already encountered an example in which a slave deceived
his master: the case of Squires Jackson and his newspaper. Think for a moment
about the source of that story. Even without a footnote to indicate where the
information came from, readers of this chapter can deduce that it was left in
the historical record by Jackson, not the planter. (The planter, after all, went
away convinced Jackson could not read.) Imagine how different our impres­
sion would be if the only surviving record of the incident was the planter's
diary. We might then be reading an entry something like the following:

A humorous incident occurred today. While entering the woodshed to attend

some business, I came upon my slave Squires. His eyes were :fixed with intense
interest upon an old copy of a newspaper he had come upon, which alarmed me
some until I discovered the rascal was reading its contents upside down. "Why
Squires," I said innocently. "What is the latest news?" He looked up at me with
a big grin and said, "Massa, de 'Federates jes' won de war!" It made me laugh
to see the darkey's simple confidence. I wish I could share his optimism.

This entry is fictional, but having Jackson's version of the story serves
to cast suspicion on similar entries in real planters' diaries. One Louisiana
slave owner, for instance, marveled that his field hands went on with their
Christmas party apparently unaware that Yankee raiding parties had pillaged
a nearby town. "We have been watching the negroes dancing for the last
176 A.ma THE FACT: Tm All.T OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

''They are hav.ing a merry time, thoughtless creatures, they think not of the
morrow." This scene of a Christmas party, similar to the one described by the
Louisiana planter, appeared with an article written by a northern correspondent
for Frank Leslie's IUustrated Newspaper in 1857. The picture, reflecting the popular
stereotype of slaves as cheerful and ignorantly content with their lot, suggests
that the social constraints of the times made it as difficult for south.em African
Americans to be completely candid with their north.em liberators as it had been to
be candid with their southern masters.

two hours. .. They are having a merry time, thoughtless creatures, they
•

think not of the morrow." It apparently never occurred to the planter that
the "thoughtless" merriment may have been especially great because of the
northern troops nearby.*
The harsh realities of the war forced many southerners to consider just
how little they really knew about their slaves. Often, the very servants that
masters deemed most loyal were the first to run off. Mary Chesnut, whose
house was not fur from Fort Sumter, sought in vain to penetrate the blank
expressions of her slaves. "Not by one word or look can we detect any
change in the demeanor of these Negro servants....You could not tell that

* Readers who review the opening narrative of this chapter will discover that they have already
encountered quite a few other examples of deception arising out of the social situations in which
the actors found themselves. In fact, except for the black soldier's comment about the bottom rail
being top, every example of white-black relationships cited in the opening section has some element
of concealment or deception. It may be worth noting that we did not select the opening incidents
with that fact in mind. The preponderance of deception was noted only when we reviewed the draft
several days after it had been written.
 The View from the Bottom Rail 177

they even hear the awful noise that is going on in the bay [at Fort Sumter],
though it is dinning in their ears night and day....Are they stolidly stupid,
or wiser than we are,silent and strong,biding their time?"
It is tempting to suppose that white northerners who helped liberate slaves
might have provided more accurate accounts of freedpeople's attitudes. But
that assumption is dangerous. Although virtually all northern slaves had
been freed by 1820, race prejudice remained strong.Antislavery forces often
combined a strong dislike of slavery with an equally strong desire to keep
the freedpeople out of the North.Most housing and transportation facilities
were segregated there, so that whites and blacks had much less close social
contact than in the South.
Thus,while some Union soldiers went out of their way to be kind to slaves
they encountered,many looked upon African Americans with distaste or open
hostility.More than a few Yankees believed they were fighting a war to save
the Union,not to free the "cursed Nigger," as one recruit put it."White offi­
cers who commanded black regiments could be remarkably unsympathetic.
"Any one listening to your shouting
Both nonhern and southern white and singing can see how grotesquely
accounts ofblack Americans need ignorant you are," one officer lec­
to be viewed with caution. tured his troops,when they refused to
accept less than the pay promised on
enlistment. Even missionaries and other sympathetic northerners who came
to occupied territory had preconceptions to overcome. "I saw some very low­
looking women who answered very intelligently,contrary to my expectations,"
noted Philadelphia missionary Laura Towne. So we need to be cautious even
when reviewing northern accounts.
Indeed, perceptive whites recognized that just as slaves had been depen­
dent on their southern masters before the war,freedpeople found themselves
similarly vulnerable to the new class of conquerors. "One of these blacks,
fresh from slavery, will most adroitly tell you precisely what you want to
hear," noted northerner Charles Nordhoff.

To cross-examine such a creature is a task of the most delicate nature; if you

chance to put a leading question he will answer to its spirit as closely as the
compass needle answers to the magnetic pole. Ask if the enemy had fifty thou­
sand men, and he will be sure that they had at least that many; express your
belief that they had not five thousand, and he will laugh at the idea of their
having more than forty-five hundred.

Samuel Gridley Howe,a wartime commissioner investigating the freedpeo­

ple's condition,saw the situation clearly. "The negro, like other men,natu­
rally desires to live in the light of truth," he argued, "but he hides in the
shadow of falsehood, more or less deeply, according as his safety or welfare
seems to require it.Other things equal,the freer a people,the more truthful;
and only the perfectly free and fearless are perfectly truthful."
Furthermore, northerners found it hard to imagine the freedpeople's
point of view because the culture of southern African Americans was so
178 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

unfamiliar. The first hurdle was simple communication, given the wide vari­
ety of accents and dialects spoken by northerners and southerners. Charles
Nordhoff noted that often he had the feeling that he was "speaking with
foreigners." The slaves' phrase "I go shum" puzzled him until he discovered
it to be a contraction of "I'll go see about it." Another missionary was teach­
ing his students "what various things were for, eyes, etc. He asked what ears
were made for, and when they said, 'To yer with,' he could not understand
them at all."
If black dialect was difficult to understand, black culture and religion
could appear even more unfathomable. Although most slaves shared with
northerners a belief in Christianity, black methods of worship shocked more
than one staid Unitarian. After church meetings, slaves often participated in
a singing and dancing session known as a "shout," in which the leader would
sing out a line of song and the chorus would respond, dancing in rhythm to
the music. AB the night proceeded, the music became more vocal and the
dancing more vigorous. One missionary noted, "It was the most hideous and
at the same time the most pitiful sight I ever witnessed."
AB sympathetic as many northerners wished to be, significant obstacles
prevented them from fully appreciating the freedpeople's point of view.
The nature of slave society and the persistence of prejudice made it virtually
impossible for blacks and whites to deal with one another candidly.

THE FREEDPEOPLE SPEAK

From the very beginning, however, some observers recognized the value of
the former slaves' perspective. If few black people could write, their stories
could be written down by others and made public. Oral testimony, tran­
scribed by literate editors, would allow black Americans to speak out on
issues that affected them most.
The tradition of oral evidence began even before the slaves were freed.
Abolitionists recognized the value of firsthand testimony against the slave
system. They took down and published the stories of fugitive slaves who
escaped to the North. During the war, Congress also established the Freed­
man's Inquiry Commission, which collected information that might aid the
government.
In the half century following Reconstruction, however, interest in preserv­
ing black history languished. An occasional journalist or historian interviewed
former slaves. Educators at black schools, such as the Hampton Institute,
published recollections. But most historians writing about Reconstruction
ignored them, as well as the freedpeople's perspective in general. Instead
they relied on white accounts, which painted a rather partial picture.
William A. Dunning, a historian at Columbia University, was perhaps the
most influential advocate of the prevailing viewpoint. He painted the freed­
people as childish, happy-go-lucky creatures who failed to appreciate the
responsibilities of their new status. "AB the full meaning of [emancipation]
 The View from the Bottom Rail 179

was grasped by the freedmen," Dunning wrote, "great numbers of them aban­
doned their old homes, and, regardless of crops to be cultivated, stock to be
cared for, or food to be provided, gave themselves up to testing their free­
dom. They wandered aimless but happy through the country." At the same
time, Dunning claimed that southern whites had "devoted themselves with
desperate energy to the procurement of what must sustain the life of both
themselves and their former slaves." Such were the conclusions deduced
without the aid of the freedpeople's perspectives.
Only in the twentieth century were systematic efforts made to question
blacks about their experiences. Interest in the African American heritage
rose markedly during the 1920s, spurred by the efforts of black scholars such
as W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Johnson, and Carter Woodson, the editor and
founder of the Journal ofNegro History. Those scholars worked hard to over­
turn the stereotypes promoted by the Dunning school. Moreover, sociolo­
gists and anthropologists at American universities began to analyze southern
culture, using the tools of the new social sciences. By the beginning of the
1930s, historians at Fisk University in Nashville and Southern University in
Baton Rouge had instituted projects to collect oral evidence.
Ironically, the hard times of the Depression sparked the greatest single effort
to gather oral testimony from the freedpeople. One of the many agencies char-
tered by the Roosevelt adminis­
tration was the Federal Writers'
The hard times of the Depression Project (FWP). The project's pri­
sparked the greatest single effort to mary goal was to compile and pub­
gather oral history from fonner slaves. lish cultural guides to each of the
forty-eight states, using unem-
ployed writers and journalists. But
under the direction of folklorist John Avery Lomax, the FWP also organized
staffs in many states to interview former slaves.
Although Lomax's project placed greatest emphasis on collecting black
folklore and songs, the FWP's directive to interviewers included a long list
of historical questions that they were encouraged to ask. The following sam­
pling gives an indication of the project's interests:

"What work did you do in slavery days? Did you ever earn any money?
"What did you eat and how was it cooked? Any possums? Rabbits? Fish?
Was there a jail for slaves? Did you ever see any slaves sold or auctioned off ?
How and for what causes were the slaves punished? Tell what you saw.
"What do you remember about the war that brought you your freedom? "When
the Yankees came, what did they do or say?

The results of these interviews were remarkable. More than 2,300 were
recorded and edited in state FWP offices and sent to Washington, assembled
in 1941, and published in typescript. A facsimile edition, issued during the
1970s, takes up nineteen volumes. Supplementary materials, including hun­
dreds of interviews never forwarded to Washington during the project's life,
180 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

comprise another twenty-two volumes. Benjamin Botkin, the series' original

editor, recognized the collection's importance. "These life histories, taken
down as far as possible in the narrator's words, constitute an invaluable body
of unconscious evidence or indirect source material," he noted. "For the first
and last time, a large number of surviving slaves (many of whom have since
died) have been permitted to tell their own story, in their own way."
Even Botkin, however, recognized that the narratives could not simply
be taken at face value. Like all primary-source materials, they need to be
viewed in terms of the context in which they originated. To begin with,
even nineteen volumes packed with interviews constitute a small sampling
of the original four million freedpeople. What sort of selection bias might
exist? Geographic imbalance comes quickly to mind. Are the slave interviews
drawn from a broad cross section of southern states? Counting the number
of slaves interviewed from each state, we discover only 155 interviews from
African Americans living in Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and
Kentucky-about 6 percent of the total number of interviews published. Yet
in 1860, 2 3 percent of the southern slave population lived in those states.
Thus the upper South is underrepresented in the collection.
What about age? Because the interviews took place primarily between
1936 and 1938, former slaves were fairly old: fully two-thirds were more
than eighty years of age. How sharp were the elderly informants' memories?
The Civil War was already seventy years in the past. Common sense sug­
gests that the further away from an
Are the interviews biased because event, the less detailed a person's
they focus on those who survived memory is likely to be. In addition,
age may have biased the type of
slavery, rather than those who died
recollections given. Historian John
from harsh treatment? Blassingame has noted that the
average life expectancy of a slave in
1850 was less than fifty years. Those who lived to a ripe old age might well
have survived because they were treated better than the average slave. If so,
their accounts would reflect some of the milder experiences of slaves.
Also, if those interviewed were predominantly old in 1936, they were pre­
dominantly young during the Civil War. Almost half (43 percent) were less
than ten years old in 1865. Sixty-seven percent were under age fifteen, and
83 percent were under age twenty. Thus many interviewers remembered
slavery as it would have been experienced by a child. If the conditions of
bondage were relatively less harsh for a child than for an adult slave, once
again the FWP narratives may be somewhat skewed toward an optimistic
view of slavery. (On the other hand, it might be argued that because chil­
dren are so impressionable, memories both good and bad might have been
magnified.)
Distortions may be introduced into the slave narratives in ways more seri­
ous than sample bias. Interviewers, simply by choosing their questions, define
the kinds of information a subject will volunteer. Even the most seemingly
 The View from the Bottom Rail 181

innocent questions are liable to influence the way a subject responds. Take,
for example,the following questions:

Where did you hear about this job opening?

How did you hear about this job opening?
So you saw our want ad for this job?

Each question is directed at the same information, yet each suggests to the
subject a different response. The first version ("Where did you hear ...")
implies that the interviewer wants a specific,limited answer ("Down at the
employment center."). The second question, by substituting "how " for
"where," invites the subject to offer a longer response ("Well,I'd been look­
ing around for a job for several weeks, and I was over at the employment
office when ...").The final question signals that the interviewer wants only
a yes or no confirmation to a question whose answer is believed to be already
known.
Interviewers,in other words,constantly communicate to their subjects the
kind of evidence they want,the length of the answers, and even the manner
in which answers ought to be offered. If such cues influence routine con­
versations, they prove even more crucial when a subject as controversial as
slavery is involved,and when relations between blacks and whites continue to
be strained.In fact,the most important cue an interviewer was likely to have
given was one presented before any conversation took place.Was the inter­
viewer white or black? Interracial tensions remained sharp throughout the
South during the 1930s.In hundreds of ways,black people were made aware
that they were still considered inferior and that they were to remain within
strictly segregated and subordinate bounds. From 1931 to 1935, more than
seventy African Americans were lynched in the South,often for minor or non­
existent crimes.Black prisoners found themselves forced to negotiate grossly
unfavorable labor contracts if they wished to be released. Sharecroppers and
other poor farmers were constantly in debt to white property owners.
Matters of etiquette reflected the larger state of affairs. White south­
erners commonly addressed black adults by their first names, or as "boy,"
"auntie," or "uncle," regardless of the black person's status and even if the
white person knew the black person's full name. Black people were required
to address white people as "ma'am " or "mister." Such distinctions applied
even on the telephone. If an African American placed a long-distance call
for "Mr.Smith " in a neighboring town,the white operator would ask,"Is he
colored?" The answer being yes,her reply would be,"Don't you say 'Mister'
to me. He ain't 'Mister' to me." Conversely, an operator would refuse to
place a call by a black caller who did not address her as "Ma'am."
Thus most African Americans were reticent about volunteering informa­
tion to white FWP interviewers. "Lots of old slaves closes the door before
they tell the truth about their days of slavery," noted one black Texan to an
interviewer. "When the door is open, they tell how kind their masters was
how rosy it all was." Samuel S.Taylor,a skilled black interviewer in Arkansas,
182 Arn:R THE FAcT: Tm ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

"I've told you too much. How come they want all this staff from the
colored people anyway? Do you take any stories from the white people? ...
They don't need me to tell it to them." This Georgia woman, like many of
the subjects interviewed for the Federal Writers' Project, was still living in
the 1930s on the plantation where she had grown up as a slave child.The
plantation was still owned by descendants of her former master.Under such
conditions, suspicion toward FWP interviewers was a predictable reaction,
even if the interviewer was black:; doubly so if he or she was white and a
resident of the community.

found that he had to reassure informants that the information they were giv­
ing would not be used against them. "I've told you too much," one subject con­
cluded. "How come they want all this stuff from the colored people anyway?
 The View from the Bottom Rail 18 3

Do you take any stories from the white people? They know all about it. They
know more about it than I do. They don't need me to tell it to them."
Often the whites who interviewed blacks lived in the same town and were
long acquaintances. "I 'members when you was barefoot at de bottom," one
black interviewee told his white (and balding) interviewer; "now I see you a set­
tin' dere, gittin' bare at de top." Another black man revealed an even closer rela­
tionship when he noted that his wife,
"I've told you too much. How come Ellen, "'joy herself, have a good time
they want all this stufffrom the nussin' [nursing] white folks chil­
colored people anyway? Do you take lun. Nussed you; she tell me 'bout it
any stories from the white people?" many time." In such circumstances,
African Americans could hardly be
expected to speak frankly. One older woman summed up the situation quite
cheerfully. "Oh, I know your father en your granfather en all of dem. Bless
Mercy, child, I don't want to tell you nothin' but what to please you."
The methods used to set down FWP interviews raise additional prob­
lems. With only a few exceptions, voice recorders were not used. Instead,
interviewers took written notes of their conversations, from which they later
reconstructed their interviews. In the process, interviewers often edited their
material. Sometimes changes were made simply to improve the flow, so that
the interview did not jump jarringly from topic to topic. Other interviewers
edited out material they believed to be irrelevant or objectionable.
Furthermore, no protocol existed for transcribing African American dia­
lect. A few interviewers took great pains to render their accounts in cor­
rect English, so that regional accents and dialect disappeared. ("Fo" became
"for," "dem" became "them," and so forth.) But most interviewers tried to
provide a flavor of black dialect, with wildly varying success. In some cases
the end result sounded more like the stereotypical "darky dialect" popular
with whites of the period. "I wuz comin' frum de back uv de stable," an
interviewer might quote his subject as saying-a colloquial approach that,
to some readers, might at first seem unobjectionable. Yet few of the same
interviewers would have thought it necessary to render, with similar offbeat
spelling, the accents of a white "southun plantuh," whose speech might seem
equally exotic to an American from another region of the United States.
For that matter, consider the spellings used in "I wuz comin' frum de back
uv de stable." In fact, there is no difference in pronunciation between "was"
and "wuz"; or "frum" and "from"; or "uv" and "of." In effect, those tran­
scriptions are simply cultural markers conveying the unspoken message that,
in the eyes of the interviewer, the speaker comes from a less cultured and
less educated social class. Eventually, the FWP sent its interviewers a list of
Approved Dialect Expressions: "dem," "dose," and "gwine" were among the
permitted transcriptions; "wuz," "ovah," and "uv" were not allowed.
By understanding the difficulties of gathering oral evidence, researchers
are able to proceed more carefully in evaluating the slave narrative collec­
tion. Even so, readers new to this field may find it difficult to appreciate the
varying responses that different interviewers might elicit. In order to bring
184 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the point home, it may be helpful to analyze material that we came across
during our own research in the slave narrative collection. The interview
below is with Susan Hamlin, a black woman who lived in Charleston, and we
reprint it exactly as it appears in typescript.

Interview with Ex-Slave

On July 6th, I interviewed Susan Hamlin, ex-slave, at 17 Henrietta street,

Charleston, S. C. She was sitting just inside of the front door, on a step leading
up to the porch, and upon hearing me inquire for her she assumed that I was
from the Welfare office, from which she had received aid prior to its closing. I
did not correct this impression, and at no time did she suspect that the object
of my visit was to get the story of her experience as a slave. During our conver­
sation she mentioned her age. "Why that's very interesting, Susan," I told her,
"If you are that old you probably remember the Civil War and slavery days."
"Yes, Ma'am, I been a slave myself," she said, and told me the following story:
"I kin remember some things like it was yesterday, but I is 104 years old
now, and age is starting to get me, I can't remember everything like I use to. I
getting old, old. You know I is old when I been a grown woman when the Civil
War broke out. I was hired out then, to a Mr. McDonald, who lived on Atlan­
tic Street, and I remembers when de first shot was fired, and the shells went
right over de city. I got seven dollars a month for looking after children, not
taking them out, you understand, just minding them. I did not got the money,
Mausa got it." "Don't you think that was fair?" I asked. "If you were fed and
clothed by him, shouldn't he be paid for your work?" "Course it been fair," she
answered, "I belong to him and he got to get something to take care of me."
"My name before I was married was Susan Calder, but I married a man
named Hamlin. I belonged to Mr. Edward Fuller, he was president of the First
National Bank. He was a good man to his people till de Lord took him. Mr.
Fuller got his slaves by marriage. He married Miss Mikell, a lady what lived on
Edisto Island, who was a slave owner, and we lived on Edisto on a plantation.
I don't remember de name cause when Mr. Fuller got to be president of de
bank we come to Charleston to live. He sell out the plantation and say them
(the slaves) that want to come to Charleston with him could come and them
what wants to stay can stay on the island with his wife's people. We had our
choice. Some is come and some is stay, but my ma and us children come with
Mr. Fuller.
"We lived on St. Philip street. The house still there, good as ever. I go
'round there to see it all de time; the cistern still there too, where we used to sit
'round and drink the cold water, and eat, and talk and laugh. Mr. Fuller have
lots of servants and the ones he didn't need hisself he hired out. The slaves
had rooms in the back, the ones with children had two rooms and them that
didn't have any children had one room, not to cook in but to sleep in. They
all cooked and ate downstairs in the hall that they had for the colored people.
I don't know about slavery but I know all the slavery I know about, the people
was good to me. Mr. Fuller was a good man and his wife's people been grand
 The View from the Bottom Rail 18 5

people, all good to their slaves. Seem like Mr. Fuller just git his slaves so he
could be good to dem. He made all the little colored chillen love him. If you
don't believe they loved him what they all cry, and scream, and holler for when
dey hear he dead? 'Oh, Mausa dead my Mausa dead, what I going to do, my
Mausa dead.' Dey tell dem t'aint no use to cry, dat can't bring him back, but
de chillen keep on crying. We used to call him Mausa Eddie but he named
Mr. Edward Fuller, and he sure was a good man.
"A man come here about a month ago, say he from de Government, and
dey send him to find out 'bout slavery. I give him most a book, and what he
give me? A dime. He ask me all kind of questions. He ask me dis and he ask me
dat, didn't de white people do dis
and did dey do dat but Mr. Fuller
"He ask me all kind of questions. was a good man, he was sure good
He ask me dis and he ask me dat, to me and all his people, dey all
didn't de white people do dis and like him, God bless him, he in de
did dey do dat but Mr. Fuller was a ground now but I ain't going to let
nobody lie on him. You know he
good man, he was sure good to me
good when even the little chillen
and all his people."
cry and holler when he dead. I tell
you dey couldn't just fix us up any
kind of way when we going to Sunday School. We had to be dressed nice, if
you pass him and you ain't dress to suit him he send you right back and say
tell your ma to see dat you dress right. Dey couldn't send you out in de cold
barefoot neither. I 'member one day my ma want to send me wid some milk
for her sister-in-law what lived 'round de corner. I fuss cause it cold and say
'how you going to send me out wid no shoe, and it cold?' Mausa hear how I
talkin and turn he back and laugh, den he call to my ma to gone in de house
and find shoe to put on my feet and don't let him see me barefoot again in
cold weather.
"When de war start going good and de shell fly over Charleston he take all
us up to Aiken for protection. Talk 'bout marching through Georgia, dey sure
march through Aiken, soldiers was everywhere.
"My ma had six children, three boys and three girls, but I de only one left,
all my white people and all de colored people gone, not a soul left but me. I
ain't been sick in 2 5 years. I is near my church and I don't miss service any
Sunday, night or morning. I kin walk wherever I please, I kin walk to de Bat­
tery if I want to. The Welfare use to help me but dey shut down now, I can't
find out if dey going to open again or not. Miss (Mrs.) Buist and Miss Pringle,
dey help me when I can go there but all my own dead."
"Were most of the masters kind?" I asked. "Well you know," she answered,
"times den was just like dey is now, some was kind and some was mean; heaps
of wickedness went on just de same as now. All my people was good people.
I see some wickedness and I hear 'bout all kinds of t'ings but you don't know
whether it was lie or not. Mr Fuller been a Christian man."
"Do you think it would have been better if the Negroes had never left Africa?"
was the next question I asked. "No Ma'am, (emphatically) dem heathen didn't
186 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

have no religion. I tell you how I t'ink it is. The Lord made t'ree nations, the
white, the red and the black, and put dem in different places on de earth where
dey was to stay. Dose black ignoramuses in Africa forgot God, and didn't have
no religion and God blessed and prospered the white people dat did remember
Him and sent dem to teach de black people even if dey have to grab dem and
bring dem into bondage till dey learned some sense. The Indians forgot God
and dey had to be taught better so dey land was taken away from dem. God
sure bless and prosper de white people and He put de red and de black people
under dem so dey could teach dem and bring dem into sense wid God. Dey
had to get dere brains right, and honor God, and learn uprightness wid God
cause ain't He make you, and ain't His Son redeem you and save you wid His
Precious blood. You kin plan all de wickedness you want and pull hard as you
choose but when the Lord mek up His mind you is to change, He can change
you dat quick (snapping her fingers) and easy. You got to believe on Him if it tek
bondage to bring you to your knees.
"You know I is got converted. I been in Big Bethel (church) on my knees
praying under one of de preachers. I see a great, big, dark pack on my back,
and it had me all bent over and my shoulders drawn down, all hunch up. I look
up and I see de glory, I see a big beautiful light, a great light, and in de middle
is de Sabior, hanging so (extending her arms) just like He died. Den I gone to
praying good, and I can feel de sheckles (shackles) loose up and moving and de
pack fall off. I don't know where it went to, I see de angels in de Heaven, and
hear dem say 'Your sins are forgiven.' I scream and fell off so. (Swoon.) When
I come to dey has laid me out straight and I know I is converted cause you can't
see no such sight and go on like you is before. I know I is still a sinner but I
believe in de power of God and I trust his Holy name. Den dey put me wid de
seekers but I know I is already saved."
"Did they take good care of the slaves when their babies were born?" she
was asked. "If you want chickens for fat (to fatten) you got to feed dem," she
said with a smile, "and if you want people to work dey got to be strong, you
got to feed dem and take care of dem too. If dey can't work it come out of your
pocket. Lots of wickedness gone on in dem days, just as it do now, some good,
some mean, black and white, it just dere nature, if dey good dey going to be
kind to everybody, if dey mean dey going to be mean to everybody. Some­
times chillen was sold away from dey parents. De Mausa would come and say
'Where Jennie,' tell um to put clothes on dat baby, I want um. He sell de baby
and de ma scream and holler, you know how dey carry on. Geneally (generally)
dey sold it when de ma wasn't dere. Mr. Fuller didn't sell none of us, we stay
wid our ma's till we grown, I stay wid my ma till she dead.
"You know I is mix blood, my grandfather bin a white man and my
grandmother a mulatto. She been marry to a black so dat how I get fix like I is.
I got both blood, so how I going to quarrel wid either side?"

SOURCE: Interview with Susan Hamlin, 17 Henrietta Street.

NOTE: Susan lives with a mulatto family of the better type. The name is Hamlin not Ham­
ilton, and her name prior to her marriage was Calder not Collins. I paid particular
 The View from the Bottom Rail 18 7

attention to this and had them spell the names for me. I would judge Susan to be
in the late nineties but she is wonderfully well preserved. She now claims to be 104
years old.

From the beginning, the circumstances of this conversation arouse sus­

picion. The white interviewer, Jessie Butler, mentions that she allowed
Hamlin to think she was from the welfare office. Evidently, Butler thought
Hamlin would speak more freely if the real purpose of the visit was hid­
den. But surely the deception had the opposite effect. Hamlin, like most of
the black people interviewed, was elderly, unable to work, and dependent
on charity. If Butler appeared to be from the welfare office, Hamlin would
likely have done whatever she could to ingratiate herself. Many black inter­
viewees consistently assumed that their white interviewers had influence
with the welfare office. "You through wid me now, boss? I sho' is glad of
dat," concluded one subject. "Help all you kin to get me dat pension befo'
I die and de Lord will bless you, honey. . . . Has you got a dime to give dis
old nigger, boss?"
Furthermore, Butler's questioning was hardly subtle. When Hamlin
noted that she had to give her master the money she made from looking
after children, Butler asked, "Don't you think that was fair?" "Course it been
fair," came the quick response. Hamlin knew very well what was expected,
especially since Butler had already answered the question herself: "If you
were fed and clothed by him, shouldn't he be paid for your work?"
Not surprisingly, then, the interview paints slavery in relatively mild
colors. Hamlin describes in great detail how good her master was and how
she had shoes in the winter. When asked whether most masters were kind,
Hamlin appears eminently "fair"-"some was kind and some was mean."
She admits hearing "all kinds of t'ings but you don't know whether it was lie
or not." She does note that slave children could be sold away from parents
and that black mothers protested; but she talks as if that were only to be
expected ("de ma scream and holler, you know how dey carry on").
Equally flattering is the picture Hamlin paints of relations between the
races. "Black ignoramuses" in Africa had forgotten about God, she explains,
just as the Indians had; but "God sure bless and prosper de white people."
So Africans and the Indians are placed under white supervision, "to get dere
brains right, and honor God, and learn uprightness." Those were not exactly
the words proslavery apologists would have used to describe the situation,
but they were the same sentiments. Defenders of slavery constantly stressed
that Europeans served as benevolent models leading Africans and Indians on
the slow upward road to civilization.
All these aspects of the interview led us to be suspicious about its con­
tent. Moreover, several additional clues in the document puzzled us. Hamlin
had mentioned a man who visited her "about a month ago, say he from de
Government, and dey send him to find out 'bout slavery." Apparently her
interview with Jessie Butler was the second she had given. Butler, for her
part, made a fuss at the end of the transcript over the spelling of Hamlin's
name ("I paid particular attention to this."). It was "Hamlin not Hamilton,"
188 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

and her maiden name was "Calder not Collins." The phrasing indicates that
somewhere else Butler had seen Hamlin referred to as "Susan Hamilton."
If someone had interviewed Hamlin earlier, we wondered, could Hamilton
have been the name on that original report?
We found the answer when we continued on through the narrative col­
lection. The interview following Butler's was conducted by a man named
Augustus Ladson, with a slave named "Susan Hamilton." When compared
with Jessie Butler's interview, Augustus Ladson's makes absorbing reading.
Here it is, printed exactly as it appears in the collection:

Ex-Slave 101 Years ofAge

Has Never Shaken Hands Since 1863

"Was on Knees Scrubbing when Freedom Gun Fired

I'm a hund'ed an' one years old now, son. De only one livin' in my crowd frum
de days I wuz a slave. Mr. Fuller, my master, who was president of the Firs'
National Bank, owned the fambly of us except my father. There were eight
men an' women with five girls an' six boys workin' for him. Most o' them wus
hired out. De house in which we stayed is still dere with de sisterns an' slave
quarters. I always go to see de old home which is on St. Phillip Street.
My ma had t'ree boys an' t'ree girls who did well at their work. Hope
Mikell, my eldest brodder, an' James wus de shoemaker. William Fuller, son
of our Master, wus de bricklayer. Margurite an' Catharine wus de maids an'
look as de children.
My pa b'long to a man on Edisto Island. Frum what he said, his master
was very mean. Pa real name wus Adam Collins but he took his master' name;
he wus de coachman. Pa did supin one day en his master whipped him. De
next day which wus Monday, pa carry him 'bout four miles frum home in de
woods an' give him de same 'mount of lickin' he wus given on Sunday. He
tied him to a tree an' unhitched de horse so it couldn't git tie-up an' kill e self.
Pa den gone to de landin' an' cetch a boat <lat wus comin' to Charleston wood
fa'm products. He (was) permitted by his master to go to town on errands,
which helped him to go on de boat without bein' question'. W'en he got
here he gone on de water-front an' ax for a job on a ship so he could git to
de North. He got de job an' sail' wood de ship. Dey search de island up an'
down for him wood houndogs en w'en it wus t'ought he wus drowned, 'cause
dey track him to de river, did dey give up. One of his master' friend gone to
New York en went in a store w'ere pas wus employed as a clerk. He recon­
ize' pa is easy is pa reconize' him. He gone back home an' tell pa master who
know den dat pa wusn't comin' back an' before he died he sign' papers dat pa
wus free. Pa' ma wus dead an' he come down to bury her by de permission
of his master' son who had promised no ha'm would come to him, but dey
wus' flxin' plans to keep him, so he went to de Work House an' ax to be sold
'cause any slave could sell e self if e could git to de Work House. But it wus
on record down dere so dey couldn't sell 'im an' told him his master' people
couldn't hold him a slave.
 The View from the Bottom Rail 189

People den use to do de same t'ings dey do now. Some marry an' some live
together jus' like now. One t'ing, no minister nebber say in readin' de matri­
mony "let no man put asounder" 'cause a couple would be married tonight an'
tomorrow one would be taken away en be sold. All slaves wus married in dere
master house, in de livin' room where slaves an' dere missus an' mossa wus
to witness de ceremony. Brides use to wear some of de :finest dress an' if dey
could afford it, have de best kind of furniture. Your master nor your missus
objected to good t'ings.
I'll always 'member Clory, de washer. She wus very high-tempered. She
was a mulatto with beautiful hair she could sit on; Clory didn't take foolish­
ness frum anybody. One day our missus gone in de laundry an' :find fault
with de clothes. Clory didn't do a t'ing but pick her up bodily an' throw 'er
out de door. Dey had to sen'
fur a doctor 'cause she preg­
"Our master ain't nebber want to sell
nant an' less than two hours
his slaves. But dat didn't keep Glory de baby wus bo'n. Afta dat
frum gittin' a brutal whippin'. Dey she begged to be sold fur she
whip' 'er until dere wusn't a white didn't [want] to kill missus,

spot on her body. Dat wus de worst but our master ain't nebber
want to sell his slaves. But
I ebber see a human bein' got such a
dat didn't keep Clory frum
beatin '. I t'ought she wus goin' to die."
gittin' a brutal whippin'. Dey
whip' 'er until dere wusn't a
white spot on her body. Dat wus de worst I ebber see a human bein' got such
a beatin'. I t'ought she wus goin' to die, but she got well an' didn't get any
better but meaner until our master decide it wus bes' to rent her out. She
willingly agree' since she wusn't 'round missus. She hated an' detest' both of
them an' all de fambly.
W'en any slave wus whipped all de other slaves wus made to watch. I see
women hung frum de ceilin' of buildin's an' whipped with only supin tied
'round her lower part of de body, until w'en dey wus taken down, dere wusn't
breath in de body. I had some terribly bad experiences.
Yankees use to come t'rough de streets, especially de Big Market, huntin'
those who want to go to de "free country" as dey call' it. Men an' women wus
always missin' an' nobody could give 'count of dere disappearance. De men
wus train' up North fur sojus.
De white race is so brazen. Dey come here an' run de Indians frum dere
own Ian', but dey couldn't make dem slaves 'cause dey wouldn't stan' for it.
Indians use to git up in trees an' shoot dem with poison arrow. W'en dey
couldn't make dem slaves den dey gone to Africa an' bring dere black brother
an' sister. Dey say 'mong themselves, "we gwine mix dem up en make our­
selves king. Dats d only way we'd git even with de Indians."
All time, night an' day, you could hear men an' women screamin' to de tip
of dere voices as either ma, pa, sister, or brother wus take without any warnin'
an' sell. Some time mother who had only one chile wus separated fur life.
People wus always dyin' frum a broken heart.
190 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

One night a couple married an' de next momin' de boss sell de wife. De gal
ma got in in de street an' cursed de white woman fur all she could find. She
said: "dat damn white, pale-face bastard sell my daughter who jus' married
las' night," an' other t'ings. The white man tresten' her to call de police if she
didn't stop, but de collud woman said: "hit me or call de police. I redder die
clan to stan' dis any longer." De police took her to de Work House by de white
woman orders an' what became of 'er, I never hear.
W'en de war began we wus taken to Aiken, South Ca'lina were we stay' until
de Yankees come t'rough. We could see balls sailin' t'rough de air w'en Sher­
man wus comin'. Bumbs hit trees in our yard. W'en de freedom gun wus fired,
I wus on my 'nees scrubbin'. Dey tell me I wus free but I didn't b'lieve it.
In de days of slavory woman wus jus' given time 'nough to deliver dere
babies. Dey deliver de baby 'bout eight in de mornin' an' twelve had to be back
to work.
I wus a member of Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for
67 years. Big Zion, across de street wus my church before den an' before Old
Bethel w'en I lived on de other end of town.
Sence Lincoln shook hands with his assasin who at de same time shoot him,
frum dat day I stop shakin' hands, even in de church, an' you know how long
dat wus. I don't b'lieve in kissin' neider fur all carry dere meannesses. De Mas­
ter wus betrayed by one of his bosom frien' with a kiss.

SOURCE: Interview with (Mrs.) Susan Hamilton, 17 Henrietta Street, who claims to be 101
years of age. She has never been sick for twenty years and walks as though just 40. She was
hired out by her master for seven dollars a month which had to be given her master.

Susan Hamlin and Susan Hamilton are obviously one and the same, yet
by the end of Ladson's interview, we are wondering if we have been listen­
ing to the same person! Kindness of the masters? We hear no tales about
old Mr. Fuller, only vivid recollections of whippings so harsh "dere wusn't
a white spot on her body." To Butler, Hamlin had mentioned only cruel­
ties that she had heard about secondhand ("you don't know whether it was
lie or not"); to Ladson, she recounts firsthand experiences ("I see women
hung frum de ceilin' of buildin's an' whipped with only supin tied 'round her
lower part of de body").
Happy family relations? Instead of tales about shoes in the winter, we
hear of Hamlin's father, whipped so severely he rebels and flees. We hear of
family separations, not downplayed with a "you know how dey carry on," but
with all the bitterness of mothers whose children had been taken "without
any warnin'." We hear of a couple married one night, then callously sepa­
rated and sold the next day. In the Butler account, slave babies are fed well,
treated nicely; in the Ladson account, the recollection is of mothers who
were given only a few hours away from the fields in order to deliver their
children.
Benevolent white paternalism? This time Hamlin's tale of three races
draws a different moral. The white race is "brazen," running the Indians off
 The Viewftwn the Bottom Rail 191

"W'en any slave wus whipped all de other slaves was made to watch . .I had
. .

some terribly bad experiences." The scars from whippings on this slave's back were
recorded in 1863 by an unknown photographer traveling with the Union army.

their land. With a touch of admiration, she notes that the Indians "wouldn't
stan' for,, being made slaves. White motives are seen not as religious but as
exploitative and vengeful: "Dey say 'mong themselves, 'we gwine mix dem
192 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

up en make ourselves king. Dats cl only way we'd git even with de Indians."'
The difference between the two interviews, both in tone and substance, is
astonishing.
How do we account for this difference? Nowhere in the South Carolina
narratives is the race of Augustus Ladson mentioned, but internal evidence
would indicate he is black. In a culture in which blacks usually addressed
whites respectfully with a "sir " "ma'am " or "boss " it seems doubtful that
' '
'

Susan Hamlin would address a white man as "son" ("I'm a hund'ed an' one
years old now, son"). Furthermore, the content of the interview is just too
consistently critical of whites. Hamlin would never have remarked "De white
race is so brazen" if Ladson had been white, especially given the reticence
demonstrated in her interview with Butler. Nor would she have been so spe­
cific about the angry mother's curses ("damn white, pale-face bastard"). It
would be difficult to conceive of a more strikingly dramatic demonstration
of how an interviewer can affect the responses of a subject.

FREEDOM AND DECEPTION

The slave narrative collection, then, is not the unfiltered perspective it first
appears to be. In fact, interviews like Susan Hamlin's seem to suggest that
the search for the "true" perspectives of the freedpeople is bound to end in
failure and frustration. We have seen, first, that information from planters
and other white sources must be treated with extreme skepticism and, sec­
ond, that northern white sources deserve similar caution. Finally, it appears
that even the oral testimony of African Americans themselves must be ques­
tioned, given the circumstances under which much of it was gathered. It is as
if a detective discovered that all the clues so carefully pieced together were
hopelessly biased, leading the investigation down the wrong path.
The seriousness of the problem should not be underestimated. It is fun­
damental. We can try to ease out of the dilemma by noting that differing
degrees of bias exist-that some accounts are likely to be less deceptive
than others. Susan Hamlin's interview with Ladson, for instance, surely
portrays her feelings more accurately than the interview with Butler. But
does that mean we reject all of the Butler interview? Presumably, Susan
Hamlin's master did give her a pair of shoes one cold winter day. Are we to
assume, because of Ladson's interview, that the young child felt no grati­
tude toward "kind old" Mr. Fuller? Or that the old woman did not look
back on those years with some ambivalence? For all her life, both slave
and free, Susan Hamlin lived in a world where she was required to "feel"
one set of emotions when dealing with some people and a different set
when dealing with other people. Can we be confident that the emotions
she expressed to Ladson were her "real" feelings, while the ones to Jessie
Butler were her "false" feelings? How can we arrive at an objective con­
clusion about "real" feelings in any social situation in which such severe
strains existed?
 The View from the Bottom Rail 193

Putting the question in this light offers at least a partial way out of the
dilemma. If so many clues in the investigation are "biased"-that is, dis­
torted by the social situation in which they are set-then the widespread
nature of the distortion may serve
The elements of racism and slavery as a key to understanding the
situation. The evidence in the
determined a culture in which
case is warped precisely because
personal relations were grounded in
it reflects a distortion in the soci­
mistrust, creating a kind of economy ety itself. The elements of racism
of deception. and slavery determined a culture
in which personal relations were
grounded in mistrust, creating a kind of economy of deception, in which
slaves could survive only if they remained conscious of the need to adapt
their feelings to the situation.
The deception was mutual-practiced by both sides on each other. Susan
Hamlin was adapting the story of her past to the needs of the moment at the
same time that Jessie Butler was letting Hamlin believe her to be a welfare
agent. White masters painted lurid stories of Yankee devils with horns, while
slaves, playing roles they were expected to play, rolled their eyes in fear until
they could run straight for Union lines.
Given this logic, it would be tempting simply to turn old historical inter­
pretations on their heads. Whereas William Dunning took most white
primary sources at face value and saw only cheerful, childlike Sambos, an
enlightened history would read the documents upside down, stripping away
the camouflage to reveal slaves who, quite rationally, went about the daily
business of "puttin' on ole massa." We have already seen abundant evidence
that slaves did consciously deceive in order to protect themselves.
But simply to replace one set of feelings with another is to drastically
underestimate the strains arising out of an economy of deception. The lon­
ger that masters and slaves were compelled to live false or inauthentic lives,
the easier it must have been for them to mislead themselves as well as others.
Where white and black people alike engaged in daily deception, some of it
was inevitably directed inward, to preserve the fiction of living in a tolerable,
normally functioning society.
When the war came, shattering that fiction, whites and blacks were
exposed in vivid ways to the deception that had been so much a part of their
lives. For white slaveholders, the revelation usually came when Union troops
entered a region and slaves deserted the plantations in droves. Especially
demoralizing was the flight of slaves whom planters had believed most loyal.
"He was about my age and I had always treated him more as a companion
than a slave," noted one planter of the first defector from his ranks. Mary
Chesnut, the woman near Fort Sumter who had tried to penetrate the blank
expressions of her slaves, discovered how impossible the task had been. "]on­
athan, whom we trusted, betrayed us," she lamented, while "Claiborne, that
black rascal who was suspected by all the world," faithfully protected the
plantation.
194 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Many slaveholders, when faced with the truth, refused to recognize the
role that deception had played in their lives, thereby deceiving themselves
further. "The poor negroes don't do us any harm except when they are put
up to it," concluded one Georgia woman. A Richmond newspaper editor
demanded that a slave who had denounced Jefferson Davis "be whipped
every day until he confesses what white man put these notions in his head."
Yet the war brought painful insight to others. "We were all laboring under
a delusion," confessed one South Carolina planter. "I believed that these
people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and
reflection have caused me to change these opinions ....If they were content,
happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment
of his need and flock to an enemy,whom they did not know?"
For slaves, news of emancipation brought an entirely different reaction,
but still one conditioned by the old habits. We have already seen how one
old Georgia slave couple remained impassive as Sherman's troops passed
through,until finally the wife could restrain herself no longer.Even the ser­
vant who eloquently praised freedom by a secluded brook remembered the
need for caution: "I got sort o' scared,afeared somebody hear me,an' I takes
another good look." Although emancipation promised a society founded on
equal treatment, slaves could not help wondering whether the new order
would fully replace the old. That transformation would occur only if freed­
people could forge relationships that were no longer based on the customs
of deception nor rooted in the central fiction of slavery: that blacks were
incapable of assuming a place in free society.
As historians came to recognize the value of the slave narrative collection,
they drew upon its evidence, along with other primary sources, to discover
how freedpeople sought to define their new freedoms, how they distanced
themselves from the old habits of bondage.The taking of new names was one
step. As slaves, African Americans often had no surnames, or they took the
names of their masters.Equally demeaning,given names were often casually
assigned by their owners.Cicero,Pompey,and other Latin or biblical names
were bestowed in jest. And whether or not slaves had surnames, they were
always addressed familiarly,by their given names.Such customs were part of
the symbolic language of deception,promoting the illusion that black people
were helpless dependents of the planter's family.
Thus freedpeople took for themselves new names, severing the symbolic
tie with their old masters."A heap of people say they was going to name their
selves over," recalled one freedman. "They named their selves big names....
Some of the names was Abraham an' some called their selves Lincum. Any
big name 'ceptin' their master's name.It was the fashion." Even former slaves
who remained loyal to their masters recognized the significance of the change.
"When you'all had de power you was good to me," an older freedman told
his master,"an I'll protect you now.No niggers nor Yankees shall touch you.
If you want anything,call for Samba.I mean,call for Mr. Samuel-that's my
name now."
 The View from the Bottom Rail 19 5

Just as freedpeople took new names to symbolize their new status, so also
many husbands and wives reaffirmed their marriages in formal ceremonies.
Under slavery, family ties had been ignored through the convenient fiction
that Africans were morally inferior. Black affections, the planters argued,
were dominated by impulse and the physical desires of the moment. Such
self-deception eased many a master's conscience when slave families were
separated and sold. Similarly, many planters married slaves only informally,
with a few words sufficing to join the couples. "Don't mean nuthin' less you
say, 'What God done jined, cain't no man pull asunder, '" noted one Virginia
freedman. "But dey never would say dat. Jus' say, 'Now you married. '" For
reasons of human dignity, black couples moved to solemnize their marriage
vows. There were practical reasons for an official ceremony, too: it might
qualify families for military pensions or the division of lands that was widely
rumored to be coming.
Equally symbolic for former slaves was the freedom to travel. Historian
William Dunning recognized this fact but interpreted it from the viewpoint
of his southern white sources as "aimless but happy" wandering. Richard
Edwards, a preacher in Florida, explicitly described how important moving
or traveling was:

You ain't, none o' you, gwinter feel rale free till you shakes de dus' ob de Old
Plantashun offen yore feet an' goes ter a new place whey you kin live out o'
sight o' de gret house. So long ez de shadder ob de gret house falls acrost you,
you ain't gwine ter feel lak no free man, an' you ain't gwine ter feel lak no free
'oman. You mus' all move-you mus' move clar away from de ole places what
you knows, ter de new places what you don't know, whey you kin raise up yore
head douten no fear o' Marse Dis ur Marse Tudder.

And so, in the spring and summer of 1865, southern roads were filled
with black people, hiving off "like bees trying to find a setting place," as one
former slave recalled. Most freedpeople remained near family and friends,
merely leaving one plantation in search of work at another. But a sizable
minority traveled farther, to settle in cities, move west, or try their fortunes
at new occupations.
Many former slaves traveled in order to reunite families separated through
previous sales. Freedpeople "had a passion, not so much for wandering, as
for getting together," a Freed­
man's Bureau agent observed,
"Every mother's son among them
"and every mother's son among
seemed to be in search ofhis mother; them seemed to be in search of his
every mother in search ofher mother; every mother in search
children. " of her children." Often, relatives
had only scanty information; in
other cases, so much time had passed that kin could hardly recognize each
other, especially when young children had grown up separated from their
parents.
196 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

A change of name or location,the formalization of a marriage,a reunion

with relatives-all these acts demonstrated that freedpeople wanted no part
of the old constraints and deceptions of slavery. But as much as these acts
defined black freedom,larger issues remained.How much would emancipa­
tion broaden economic avenues open to African Americans? Would freedom
provide an opportunity to rise on the social ladder? Freedpeople looked anx­
iously for signs of change.
Perhaps the most commonly perceived avenue to success was through
education. Slavery had been rationalized, in part, through the fiction that
blacks were incapable of profiting from an education. Especially where
masters had energetically prevented slaves from acquiring skills in reading,
writing,and arithmetic,the hunger for learning was intense. When north­
erners occupied the Carolina Sea Islands during the war, Yankee planta­
tion superintendents found that the most effective way to force unwilling
laborers to work was to threaten to take away their schoolbooks. "The
Negroes ...will do anything for us,if we will only teach them," noted one
missionary.
After the war, when the Freedman's Bureau sent hundreds of northern
schoolteachers into the South, black students flocked enthusiastically to
the makeshift schoolhouses. Often, classes could be held only at night, but
the freedpeople were willing."We work all day,but we'll come to you in the
evening for learning," Georgia freedpeople told their teacher. Some white
plantation owners discovered that if they wished to keep their field hands,
they would have to provide a schoolhouse and teacher.
Important as education was, the freedpeople were preoccupied even
more with their relation to the lands they had worked for so many years.
The vast majority of slaves were field hands. The agricultural life was the
one they had grown up with,and as freedpeople they wanted the chance to
own and cultivate their own property.Independent ownership would lay to
rest the lie that black people were incapable of managing their own affairs.
But without land, the idea of freedom would be just another deception.
"Gib us our own land and we take care of ourselves; but widout land, de
ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please," noted one freedman.
In the heady enthusiasm at the close of the war, many former slaves were
convinced that the Union would divide up confiscated Confederate planta­
tions. Each family, so the persistent rumor went,would receive forty acres
and a mule. "This was no slight error,no trifling idea," reported one white
observer, "but a fixed and earnest conviction as strong as any belief a man
can ever have." Slaves had worked their masters' lands for so long with­
out significant compensation,it seemed only fair that compensation should
finally be made. Further,ever since southern planters had fled from invad­
ing Union troops, some black workers had been allowed to cultivate the
abandoned fields.
The largest occupied region was the Sea Islands along the Carolina coast,
where young Sam Mitchell first heard the northern guns.As early as March
 The Vuw ftwn the Bottom Rail 197

"My Lord, ma'am, what a great thing laming is!" a freedman exclaimed to a
white teacher. Many white people were surprised by the intensity of the ex-slaves'
desire for an education. To say that the freedpeople were "anxious to learn" was not
strong enough, one Virginia school official noted; "they are crazy to learn." These
schoolboys were from South Carolina.

1863, freed people were purchasing confiscated lands from the government.
Then in January 1865, after General William Sherman completed his dev­
astating march to the sea, he extended the area open to confiscation. In his
Special Field Order No. 15, Sherman decreed that a long strip of abandoned
lands, stretching from Charleston on the north to Jacksonville on the south,
would be reserved for the freedpeople. The lands would be subdivided into
forty-acre tracts, which could be rented for a nominal fee. After three years,
the freedpeople had the option to purchase the land outright.
198 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Sherman's order was a tactical maneuver, designed to deal with the

overwhelming problem of refugees in his path. But black workers widely
perceived this order and other promises by northerners as a foretaste of
Reconstruction policy. Consequently, when white planters returned to their
plantations, they often found blacks who no longer bowed and tipped their
hats. Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, having called his former slaves
together, asked them if they would continue to work for him. "O yes, we
gwi wuk! we gwi wuk all right," came the angry response. "We gwi wuk fuh
ourse'ves. We ain' gwi wuk fuh no white man." Pinckney asked where they
would go to work-seeing as they had no land. "We ain't gwine nowhar,"
they replied defiantly. "We gwi wuk right here on de lan' whar we wuz bo'n
an' whar belongs tuh us."
Despite the defiance, Pinckney prevailed, as did the vast majority of south­
ern planters. Redistribution of southern lands was an idea supported only
by more radical northerners. Thaddeus Stevens introduced a confiscation
bill in Congress, but it was swamped by debate and never passed. President
Johnson, whose conciliatory policies pleased southern planters, determined
to settle the issue as quickly as possible. He summoned General 0. 0. How­
ard, head of the Freedman's Bureau, and instructed him to reach a solu­
tion "mutually satisfactory" to both blacks and planters. Howard, though
sympathetic to the freedpeople, could not mistake the true meaning of the
president's order.
Sadly the general returned to the Sea Islands in October and assembled
a group of freedpeople on Edisto Island. The audience, suspecting the bad
news, was restless and unruly. Howard tried vainly to speak and made "no
progress" until a woman in the crowd began singing, "Nobody knows the
trouble I've seen." The crowd joined, then was silent while Howard told
them they must give up their lands. Bitter cries of"No! No!" came from the
audience."Why, General Howard, why do you take away our lands?" called
one burly man. "You take them from us who have always been true, always
true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is
not right!"
Reluctantly, and sometimes only after forcible resistance, African Ameri­
cans lost the lands to returning planters. Whatever else freedom might mean,
it was not to signify compensation for previous labor. In the years to come,
Reconstruction would offer freedom of another sort, through the political
process. By the beginning of 1866 the radicals in Congress had charted a
plan that gave African Americans basic civil rights and political power. Yet
even that avenue of opportunity was sealed off. In the decades that followed
the first thunder of emancipation, black people would look back on their
early experiences almost as if they were part of another, vanished world. The
traditions of racial oppression and the daily deceptions that went with them
were too strong to be thoroughly overturned by the war.
 The View from the Bottom Rail 1 99

"I was right smart bit by de freedom bug for awhile," Charlie Davenport
of Mississippi recalled.

It sounded pow'ful nice to be tol: "You don't have to chop cotton no more. You
can th'ow dat hoe down an' go fishin' whensoever de notion strikes you. An'
you can roam 'roun' at night an' court gals jus' as you please. Aint no marster
gwine a-say to you, 'Charlie, you's got to be back when de clock strikes nine.'"
I was fool 'nough to b'lieve all dat kin' o' stuff.

Both perceptions-the first flush of the "freedom bug" as well as Daven­

port's later disillusionment-accurately reflect the black experience. Free­
dom had come to a nation of four million slaves, and it changed their lives
in deep and important ways. But for many years after the war put an end to
human bondage, too many freedpeople still had to settle for a view from the
bottom rail.
200 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

Leon Litwack's superb Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York, 1979) was seminal in integrating evidence from the slave nar­
ratives into a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era. It serves as an excel­
lent introduction to the freedpeople's experience after the war. Eric Foner's
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988) is the defin­
itive survey of the period. Steven Hahn provides an even broader sweep in
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery
to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003). A selection of oral interviews
from the Federal Writers' Project appears in Ira Berlin et al., Remembering
Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and
Freedom (New York, 1998). The highlight of this collection is an audiocas­
sette containing more than a dozen of the only known original recordings
of former slaves. For the full collection of interviews, see George P. Rawick,
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. and suppl. (West­
port, CT, 1972-). Further analysis of the slave narratives may be found in
John Blassingame, Slave Testimony (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977). Paul D. Escott,
Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1979), breaks down the percentage of interviews with field hands,
house servants, and artisans; the occupations they took up as freedpeople;
and the destinations of those who migrated. Heather Andrea Williams, Self­
Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC,
2003), details the desire for learning.
PAST AND PRESENT

Whose Oral History?

During the 1930s, John Avery Lomax and his son Alan used state-of-the­
art equipment to record the oral histories of former slaves on acetate disks.

Their recorder was portable, but only barely: they had to load its 315 pounds
into the trunk of a car. Given the cumbersome technology, most slave narra­
tives were not recorded on audio disks. Still, the voices of twenty-three for­
mer slaves are available on CD from PaperlessArchives.com for those who
wish to listen to them today.

Historians now face a different problem-too much material. Ahnost any­

one can record recollections of the past. Through StoryCorps, for example,
the Library of Congress and National Public Radio have created both per­
manent booths and mobile facilities where ordinary people can record their
memories. But anyone with a digital voice recorder can undertake his or her
own independent project. These devices, smaller than a pack of cigarettes,

201
202 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

have the capability of capturing well over 100 hours of material.Think what
the Lomaxes could have done with such portable equipment.
\¥ho, then, is a proper subject for an oral-history interview? The Federal
Writers' Project chose slaves because the survivors were dying out.Now we
are losing the recollections of those who experienced World War II and the
Korean War Quickly enough we will face the loss of veterans from Vietnam
.

and the civil rights movement. Obviously, the older the subject being inter­
viewed, the greater the chronological reach. A 90-year-old recalling his or
her childhood can provide personal recollections of the 1920s, while memo­
ries passed along by their parents and grandparents might contain stories
reaching back to the Civil War .

But oral history is equally useful in preserving recent experiences, to be

recalled by family or historians decades from now. "Our parents forced us
to read the Korean bible every night," recalled one Korean American in an
oral history from the 1990s. "If we couldn't finish reading it, we sometimes
had to stay up until two in the morning on school nights. ... My younger
sister, who's at Barnard College in New York, doesn't go to church now;
she despises the dogma and sees the ideology as male chauvinist. Lately,
I'm a little in line with her. I went to a Korean church here in L.A. for a
while, but some of the things they said really bothered me.In the pulpit, the
minister would say something about Hillary Clinton or make snide remarks
about 'feminazis.'" Such contemporary stories bid fair to create a mosaic as
engrossing as those recorded by the Lomaxes eight decades ago.
CHAPTER 9

The Mirror with a Memory

Is a photograph true to nature itself, or is it possible to lie with

a camera?

A nyone walking around Manhattan will eventually become aware of Jacob

Riis. A housing project and community center bear the name of this reformer
who, at the end of the nineteenth century, fought against the evils of slums
and tenements. Alexander Alland, a professional photographer, spent much
of his life in the communities ofNew York where Riis once worked the crime
beat as a journalist. Alland knew about Riis as a reformer, but nothing about
his pioneering work as a photographer. In 1942, while browsing in a second­
hand bookstore, he came across a used copy of How the Other Half Lives, in
which Riis used photographs and halftone illustrations to support his mes­
sage about the evil conditions of the city's slums. Those images revealed a
world of homeless street urchins, crowded tenements, and urban poor strug­
gling to survive. Alland wondered whether there were more of these photo­
graphs. He managed to locate Riis's youngest son, Roger William, and asked
if he would look through the family's Long Island house to see if his father
had left any of his photographic materials behind. A short time later a box
arrived, in which Alland found 415 glass plate negatives, 326 slides, and 192
prints. This treasure trove would become the Jacob A. Riis Collection of the
Museum of the City of New York.
What was the significance of the images Roger William Riis discovered in
the family attic? Historians already had considerable evidence with which they
could reconstruct Riis's life as a journalist and social reformer. He had written
books about the slums of New York and an autobiography in which he recol­
lected his life as an immigrant. Now evidence had surfaced that suggested he
had made a major contribution to documentary photography as well. Histori­
ans were already familiar with the work of Lewis Hine, who, in the early twen­
tieth century, captured images of child labor, immigrants, and urban workers;
and of the Farm Security Administration photographers, who revealed the
look of rural poverty and the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.
In 1973 Alland published Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen, which
included many photographs not seen in public since Riis used them in his lan­
tern slide shows some ninety years earlier. The book suggested that Riis had

203
204 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

importance as a photographer as well as a social reformer. The director of the

Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art suggested
that Riis had the photographer's intuitive sense of discovered images; he "knew
the habits and habitat of photographer's luck," which framed his work. Riis
may not have concerned himself with producing art, but he "was intuitively
interested in problems of form without identifying these as artistic problems."
In short, he believed that Riis, no matter how unintentionally, was an artist.
For the historian, certain evidence contradicts that claim. If photogra­
phy was important to Riis, why did he hide his work in the attic without
telling his family? A grandson asserted, "In
"In his letters-I have read his letters-I have read most of them-he
most of them-he never never mentions a camera." In fact, in The
Making of an American, Riis talks at length
mentions a camera. "
about his journalism and writing, yet he says
little about his photographs. It was not even a pastime. "I had use for it," he
explained, "and beyond that I never went." For him photography was a tool,
not an avocation. All the same, Riis the photographer remains important to
historians. His images provide an invaluable record of an urban world invis­
ible to most middle-class Americans who, safe in their prosperous neighbor­
hoods, ignored the presence of mass poverty in the rapidly growing cities of
late-nineteenth-century America. The poor and their troubles were "out of
sight" and hence "out of mind." What, then, can historians learn from this
photographic record that more traditional written sources haven't already
told them? Can they read Riis's photographs to learn more about life in the
teeming cities of late-nineteenth-century America?
In the forty years following the Civil War, more than 24 million peo­
ple flooded into American cities. While the population of the agricultural
hinterlands doubled during these years, urban population increased by more
than 700 percent. Sixteen cities could boast populations over 50,000 in 1860;
by 1910 more than a hundred could make that claim. New York City alone
grew by 2 million. Urban areas changed not only in size but also in eth­
nic composition. While many of the new city-dwellers had migrated from
rural America, large numbers came from abroad. Most antebellum cities had
been relatively homogeneous, with perhaps an enclave of Irish or German
immigrants; the metropolises at the turn of the century were home to large
groups of southern- as well as northern-European immigrants. Again, New
York City provides a striking example. By 1900 it included the largest Jew­
ish population of any city in the world, as many Irish as in Dublin, and more
Italians and Poles than in any city outside Rome or Warsaw. Enclaves of
Bohemians, Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, Scandinavians, and other nationali­
ties added to the ethnic mix.
The quality of living in cities changed, too. As industry crowded into city
centers, the wealthy and middle classes fled along newly constructed trolley
and rail lines to the quiet of developing suburbs. Enterprising realtors either
subdivided or replaced the mansions of the rich with tenements, in which a
maximum number of people could be packed into a minimum of space. Crude
sanitation transformed streets into breeding grounds for typhus, scarlet
 The Mirror with a Memory 205

fever, cholera, and other epidemic diseases. Few tenement rooms had out­
side windows; less than 10 percent of all buildings had either indoor plumb­
ing or running water.
The story of the urban poor and their struggle against the slum's cruel waste
of lives is well known today-as it was even at the turn of the century-because
several generations of social workers and muckrakers studied the slums first­
hand and wrote indignantly about what they found. Not only did they collect
statistics to document their general observations, but they compiled numer­
ous case studies that described the collective experience in compelling stories
about individuals.Jacob Riis was a leader in this endeavor. Few books have had
as much impact on social policy as his landmark study of New York's Lower
East Side, How the Other Half Lives. It was at once a shocking revelation of
the conditions of slum life and a call for reform. As urban historian Sam Bass
Warner concluded, "Before Riis there was no broad understanding of urban
poverty that could lead to political action."
Riis had come to know firsthand the degrading conditions of urban life.
In 1870, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the growing tide of emigrants
who fled the poverty of the Scandinavian countryside for the opportunities
offered in America. Riis was no starving peasant; in fact his father was a
respected schoolmaster and his family comfortably middle class. But Jacob
had little taste for book learning and preferred manual work as a carpenter.
Unable to find a job in his hometown and rejected by his local sweetheart, he
set out for the United States.
Once there, Riis retraced the pattern that millions of immigrants before
him had followed. For three years he wandered in search of the promise of
the new land. He built workers' shacks near Pittsburgh, trapped muskrats in
upstate New York, sold furniture, did odd jobs, and occasionally returned to
carpentry. In none of that work did he find either satisfaction or success. At
one point, poverty reduced him to begging for crumbs outside New York
City restaurants and spending nights in a police lodging house. His health
failed. He lingered near death until the Danish consul in Philadelphia took
him in. At times his situation grew so desperate and his frustration so intense
that he contemplated suicide.
Riis, however, had a talent for self-promotion. Eventually he landed a job
with a news association in New York and turned his talent to reporting. The
direction of his career was determined in 1877, when he became the police
reporter for the New York Tribune.
He collected the "news that means He was well-suited for the job, his
trouble to someone: the murders, earlier wanderings having made him
fire, suicides, robberies, and all that all too familiar with the seamy side of
urban life. The police beat took him
sort that don't get into court. "
to headquarters near The Bend, what
Riis referred to as the "foul core of New York' s slums." Every day he collected
the "news that means trouble to someone: the murders, fire, suicides, robber­
ies, and all that sort that don' t get into court." Over the course of a year, police
dragnets collected some forty thousand indigents, who were carted off to the
workhouses and asylums. And at night Riis shadowed the police to catch a
206 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

view of the neighborhood "off its guard." He began to visit immigrants in

their homes, where he observed their continual struggle to preserve a measure
of decency amidst disease and poverty.
As a Tribune reporter, Riis published expose after expose on wretched
slum conditions. In so doing he followed the journalistic style of the day.
Most reporters had adopted the strategies found in the Charles Dickens nov­
els Riis had enjoyed as a boy, personifying social issues through the use of
graphic detail and telling vignettes. Such concrete examples involved readers
most directly with the squalor of city slums. The issue of female exploitation
in sweatshops became the story of an old woman Riis discovered paralyzed
by a stroke on her own doorstep. The plight of working children, who had
neither education nor more than passing familiarity with the English lan­
guage, was dramatized by the story of Pietro, the young Italian boy unable
to keep awake at night school. Touching stories brought home the struggles
of the poor better than general statistics. They also sold newspapers, because
middle-class readers found these stories both disturbing and fascinating.
But Riis found the newspaper life frustrating. His stories may have been
vivid, but apparently not vivid enough to shock anyone to action. For over
four decades, New York authorities had made token efforts at slum clear­
ance, but by 1890 the conditions about which Riis protested had grown
steadily worse. The Lower East Side had a greater population density than
any neighborhood in the world-3 3 5 ,000 people to one square mile of the
tenth ward and as many as 1 person per square foot in the worst places.*
New York's poor died at a rate much higher than cities elsewhere in the
United States and Europe.
In frustration, Riis left the Tribune to give lectures and write How the Other
Half Lives. He wanted to make a case for reform that even the most callous
officials could not dismiss, and a full-length book accompanied by public talks
was more likely to accomplish what a series of daily articles could not. The new
format enabled Riis to weave his individual stories into a broader indictment
of urban blight. It allowed him to buttress concrete stories with collections of
statistics. And perhaps most important, it inspired him to provide documentary
proof of a new sort-proof so vivid and dramatic that even the most compel­
ling literary vignettes seemed weak by comparison. Riis sought to document
urban conditions with the swiftly developing techniques of photography.
From his own experience and that of other urban reformers, Riis had
learned that photographs could be powerful weapons to engage the public
imagination. In 187 6, over a decade before Riis would publish How the Other
Half Lives, he bought a stereopticon, or "magic lantern," that projected pic­
tures onto a screen. With it, he traveled around Brooklyn and Long Island,
attracting audiences to his exhibitions of beautiful landscapes in which he
mingled advertisements from local merchants. From that experience, he
learned that pictures engaged the popular imagination in ways the spoken

*Those readers conjuring up a picture of slum-dwellers standing like sardines row on row, each with
his or her own square foot, must remember that tenement space reached upward through several sto­
ries. The statistic refers to square footage of ground area, not square footage of actual floor space.
 The Mirror with a Memory 207

or written word could not. And from the experience of two English authors,
John Thompson and Adolph Smith, he learned that photographs could be
powerful weapons to arouse popular indignation. Thompson and Smith had
included photographs in their 1877 book on London slums because, as they
explained, "The unquestionable accuracy of this testimony will enable us
to present true types of the London poor and shield us from accusations of
either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance."
For Riis their argument was a compelling one. If photographs accompanied
How the Other Half Lives, no corrupt politician could dismiss its arguments
as opinionated word-paintings spawned by the imagination of an overheated
reformer. Photography indisputably showed life as it really was.

"REALITY" AND PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

From the moment in 1839 when the French pioneer of photography Louis­
}acques Daguerre announced his discovery of a process to fix images per­
manently on a copper plate, observers repeatedly remarked on the camera's
capacity to record reality. More than anything else, the seeming objectivity
of the new medium caught the popu­
The camera captured only those lar imagination. The camera captured
objects that appeared before the only those objects that appeared before
lens-nothing more, nothing less. the lens-nothing more, nothing less.
So faithful was the camera that people
often commented that the photographic image recorded the original with
an exactness "equal to nature itself." Indeed, one of the attractions of the
new medium was that it could accurately reveal the look of other parts of the
United States and the world. Nineteenth-century Americans were hungry
for visual images of unseen places. Few had ever seen the trans-Mississippi
West, much less Europe or the South Pacific. Almost no one had access
to pictures that satisfied curiosity about exotic lands or people. As a result,
crowds flocked to the galleries of a painter such as Albert Bierstadt when he
displayed his grand landscapes of the Rocky Mountains. Even Bierstadt's
paintings, though, were colored by his romantic notions of the West, just as
all artists' work reflects their own personal biases.
The new photography seemed to have no style-that was its promise.
It recorded only what was before the camera. Reproductions were so faithful
to the original that close observation with a magnifying glass often revealed
details that had been invisible to the naked eye. The American writer and
physician Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the popular conception when
he noted that the camera was even more than "the mirror of reality"; it was
"the mirror with a memory."
Certainly, there was no denying the camera's unprecedented ability to record
detail in a way that paintings could not. Yet from today's vantage point, it is eas­
ier to see the limits of the camera's seeming objectivity. Any modern amateur
photographer will appreciate immediately how deceptive the camera's claim
to mirroring reality can be. Merely to sight through the viewfinder reminds
us that every photograph creates its own frame, including some objects and
208 A.mR THI!. FACT: THE ART OP HISTORICAL DETECTION

The cumbersome technology of early photography restricted the use of

photography largely to pr�onals. Field photographers had to take along darkrooms
in which they prepared the photographic plates that went into a heavy box camera. The
van pictured here was used by a photographer during the Crimean War. Matthew
Brady and his assistants employed similar large wagons during the Civil War. They
soon discovered, much to their chagrin, that such rolling darkrooms made
uncomfortably obvious targets for enemy artillery and sharpshooters.

excluding others. The problem of selection of evidence, which is at the heart of

the historian's task, remains of paramount importance in photography.
The situation becomes even more complex when we begin to make sim­
ple photographic adjustments once the frame has been selected. Far from
recording every detail within the lens's reach, we immediately begin exclud­
ing details by turning the focusing ring: in choosing a closeup, background
details blur; if aiming for a distant subject, it is the foreground that becomes
hazy. The technical constraints of the camera thus limit what can be recorded.
Hwe close down the aperture of the camera's lens (the circular hole that allows
light to pass through the lens), the camera's depth of field is increased, bring­
ing into focus a larger area within the path of the lens. On the other hand,
photographers who wish to concentrate the viewer's attention on a central
subject will eliminate cluttering details by decreasing the depth of field.
Of course, it may be argued with a good deal of justice that many, if
not all, of these distorting capabilities of the camera are irrelevant when
 The Mirror with a Memory 2 09

discussing the work of Jacob Riis. Riis worked with neither a sophisticated
camera nor a particularly extensive knowledge of photographic principles.
His primary goals were not to record scenes aesthetically and artistically but
to capture the subject matter before his camera. The niceties of art would
have to wait.
Indeed, when Riis began his photographic efforts, he quickly discov­
ered that the primitive nature of photography precluded too much atten­
tion to aesthetic details, especially in his line of work. In the 1880s taking
pictures was no simple matter. Each step in the photographic process pre­
sented formidable obstacles. First, would­
In the 1880s taking pictures be photographers had to learn to prepare a
was no simple matter. light-sensitive chemical mixture and spread
it evenly on the glass plates that served as
photographic negatives. For work in the field, they had to take along a porta­
ble darkroom, usually a clumsy tent perched on a tripod. Here the negatives
were taken from the cumbersome box camera and developed in chemical
baths. Additional solutions were necessary to transfer the image from the
plate to the final paper print. Such a process taxed the ingenuity and dedica­
tion of even the most avid practitioners.
Fortunately, advances in chemistry, optics, and photographic technology
gave birth to a new generation of equipment, the "detective camera." Wily
photographers took to disguising cameras as doctors' satchels, briefcases,
books, revolvers, and vest buttons-hence the nickname detective camera.
To ease the burden of field photographers and make possible the candid
shot, a number of companies had introduced small cameras about the size of
a cigar box. Some carried as many as twelve photographic plates that could
be used before the camera required reloading.
George Eastman simplified the process even further with his Kodak cam­
era. Introduced to the public in 1888, the Kodak was more than an improved
detective camera; it was the first model that replaced glass negatives with
a photographic emulsion coated on paper rolls. For twenty-five dollars, an
aspiring photographer could acquire the camera loaded with a hundred shots.
Once the film had been exposed, the owner simply returned the camera to
the dealer, who removed the spool in a darkroom and shipped it to Eastman's
factory for processing. For an additional ten dollars, the dealer would reload
the camera with new film. So successfully had Eastman reduced the burden
on amateur photographers that his ads could boast, "You press the button,
we do the rest."
But even the advances in photographic technology did not eliminate
Riis' s difficulties. To help him, he enlisted the assistance of several friends
in the Health Department who also happened to be amateur photographers.
Together they set out to catch their subjects unawares. That meant skulk­
ing around the Bend in the dead of night, with the normal photographic
paraphernalia increased by bulky and primitive flash equipment. For a flash
to work, a highly combustible powder was spread along a pan. The pan was
then held up, and Riis exploded a blank cartridge from a revolver to ignite
210 AFru. THE FACT: THE ART OJI HISTORICAL DETECTION

Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement-"Five Cents a Spot"

the powder. This photographic entourage sneaking about town after hours
made a remarkable sight, as the New York Sun reported:

Somnolent policemen on the street, denizens of the dives in their dens, tramps
and bummers in their so-called lodgings, and all the people of the wild and
wonderful variety of New York night life have in turn marvelled at and been
frightened by the phenomenon. What they saw was three or four figures in the
gloom, a ghostly tripod, some weird and uncanny movements, the blinding
flash, and then they heard the patter of retreating footsteps and their m}'5teri­
ous visitors were gone before they could collect their scattered thoughts.

The results from using such finicky equipment were not always pre­
dictable. Sometimes the noise would awaken unsuspecting subjects and
create a disturbance. On one particularly unfortunate occasion Riis had
gone to "Blind Man's Alley" to photo­
"The dirt was so thick on the graph five sightless men and women liv­
walls it sm,othered the fire." ing in a cramped attic room. Soon after
his eyes cleared from the blinding flash,
he saw flames climbing up the rags covering the walls. Fear gripped him
as he envisioned the blaze sweeping through twelve rickety flights of stairs
between the attic and safety. Fighting the impulse to flee, he beat out the
 The Mirror with a Mmwry 211

In the original edition ofHO'IJJ the Other llalfLives, seventeen of the photographs
appeared as blurry halftones and nineteen as artists' engravings, such as this rendering
of the "Five Cents a Spot" photograph. A comparison of the two illustrations quickly
demonstrates how much more graphically the photograph presented Riis's concerns.
Riis continued to take photographs for other books he published, although it was not
until well into the twentieth century that mass-reproduction techniques could begin
to do justice to them.

flames with his coat and then rushed to the street seeking help. The first
policeman who heard his story burst out laughing. "Why, don't you know
thaes the Dirty Spoon?" he responded. "It caught fire six times last win­
ter, but it wouldn't bum. The dirt was so thick on the walls it smothered
the fire."
Under such precarious circumstances, it might be argued that Riis's pho­
tography more closely mirrored reality precisely because it was artless, and that
what it lacked in aesthetics it gained in documentary detail. On page 210, for
example, we see a picture taken on one ofRiis's night expeditions, oflodgers at
one ofthe crowded "five cents a spot" tenements. The room itself, Riis informs
us in How the Other HalfLives, is "not thirteen feet either way," in which "slept
twelve men and women, two or three in bunks in a sort of alcove, the rest on
the floor." The sleepy faces and supine bodies reflect the candid nature of the
picture; indeed, Riis had followed a policeman who was raiding the room in
order to drive the lodgers into the street. The glare ofthe flash, casting distinct
212 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

shadows, reveals all of the crowding, dirt, and disorder. This photograph is no
aesthetic triumph, perhaps, but it does reveal a wealth of details that prove most
useful to the curious historian.
We notice, for instance, that the stove in the foreground is a traditional
wood-burning model, with its fuel supply stacked underneath. Space in
the apartment is so crowded that footlockers and bundles have been piled
directly on top of the stove. (Have they been moved from their daytime
resting places on the bunks? Or do these people carry their possessions onto
the street during the day?) The dishes and kitchen utensils are piled high
on shelves next to the stove. The bedding is well-used, dirty, and make­
shift. Such details are nowhere near as faithfully recorded in the line drawing
originally published in How the Other HalfLives.
Yet no matter how "artless" the photographs of Jacob Riis may be in terms
of their aesthetic control of the medium, to assume they are bias-free seri­
ously underestimates their interpretive content. However primitive a pho­
tographer Riis may have been, he still influenced the messages he presented
through an appropriate selection of details. Even the most artless photogra­
phers make such interpretive choices in every snapshot they take.
Let us look, for example, at the most artless photographic observations
of all: the ordinary family scrapbook found in most American homes. When
George Eastman marketed his convenient pocket camera, he clearly recog­
nized the wide appeal of his product. At long last the ordinary class of peo­
ple, not just the rich and wellborn, could create for themselves a permanent
documentary record of their doings. "A collection of these pictures may be
made to furnish a pictorial history of life as it is lived by the owner," pro­
claimed one Kodak advertisement.
But while family albums provide a wide-ranging "pictorial history," they
are still shaped by conventions every bit as stylized as the romantic conven­
tions of Bierstadt or other artists with equally distinct styles. The albums
are very much ceremonial history-birthdays, anniversaries, vacations. Life
within their covers is a succession of proud achievements, celebrations, and
uncommon moments. A father' s retirement party may be covered, but prob­
ably not his routine day at the office. We see the sights at Disney World,
not the long waits at the airport. Arguments, rivalries, and the tedium of the
commonplace are missing.
If the artless photographers of family life unconsciously shape the records
they leave behind, then we must expect those who self-consciously use pho­
tography to be even more interpretive with their materials. This manipula­
tion is not a matter of knowing how to use Photoshop, but rather a desire
to convey a coherent message through a photograph. Civil War photog­
rapher Matthew Brady wanted to capture the horrific carnage of the war.
To achieve it, he did not hesitate to drag dead bodies to a scene in order to
further the composition or the effect he desired.
But to point out such literal examples of the photographer's influence
almost destroys the point by caricaturing it. A later generation of government
 The Mirror with a Memcry 213

"A collection of these pictures may be made to furnish a pictorial history of life
,,
as it is lived by the owner. Following the dictum in the Kodak advertisement,

these two men pose happily, one holding one of the new Kodak cameras while a
friend uses another to record the scene. Like so many family album "candids," th.is
shot follows the tradition of ceremonial history-proud achievements , celebrations,
and uncommon moments. These men, dressed in their best, are tourists from
Pennsylvania enjoying spring on the White House lawn in April 1889.

photographers, those who worked during the Great Depression of the

1930s, also viewed photographs as vehicles to convey their social mes­
sages. Few photographers were more dedicated to the ideal of docwnen­
tary realism than Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shalm, and others
who photographed tenant farmers and sharecroppers for the Farm Secu­
rity Administration. Yet these photographers also brought to their work
214 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

preconceived notions about how poverty should look.As critic Susan Son­
tag has noted, they "would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their
sharecropper subjects until satisfied
"In deciding how a picture that they had gotten just the right look
should look . . . photographers on film-the precise expression on the
are always imposing standards subject's face that supported their own
notions about po:verty, light, dignity,
on their subjects. " .
texture, expl01tatton, and geometry.
In deciding how a picture should look ...photographers are always impos­
ing standards on their subjects."
Thus any series of photographs-including those Jacob Riis took for his
books-must be analyzed in the same way a written narrative is. We can
appreciate the full import of the photographs only by establishing their
historical context.What messages are they meant to convey? What are the
premises-stated or unstated-that underlie the presentation of photo­
graphs? Ironically, in order to evaluate the messages in the Riis photographs,
we must supplement our knowledge of his perspectives on the city by turn­
ing to his writings.

IMAGES OF THE OTHER HALF

Jacob Riis was an immigrant to America, like so many of those he wrote
about. He had tasted poverty and hardship. Yet in a curious way, Riis the
social reformer might best be understood as a tourist of the slums, wander­
ing from tenement to tenement, camera in hand.To classify him as such is
to suggest that despite his immigrant background, he maintained a distance
between himself and his urban subjects.
In part, that distance can be explained by Riis's own background as an
immigrant. Despite his tribulations, he came from a middle-class family,
which made it easy to choose journalism as a career.As a boy, in fact, Riis
had helped his family prepare copy for a weekly newspaper. Once estab­
lished in a job commensurate with his training, Riis found it easy to accom­
plish the goal of so many immigrants-to rise to middle-class dignity and
prosperity and to become, in the most respectable sense, not a newcomer
but an American.
Furthermore, because Riis emigrated from Denmark, his northern­
European background made it more difficult for him to empathize with the
immigrant cultures of southern and eastern Europe, increasingly the source
of new immigrants in the 1880s and 1890s. Like many native-born Ameri­
cans, Riis found most of these immigrants' customs distasteful and doubted
whether they could successfully learn the traditional American virtues. He
often entertained his audiences with tales highlighting his subjects' inferior­
ity.There was Kwan Wing, a restaurant worker, who after a night of heavy
drinking and eating rice cakes had a dream that led him to a cache of sil­
ver coins in his basement. Kwan's discovery inspired some local business
leaders to form "Children of the Sun Mining Company." Its entrepreneurs
 The Mirror 'DJitb a Memory 215

"Photographing in High Places," Teton range 1872, by William Henry Jackson.

A member ofJohn Wesley Powell's earlier expedition down the Colorado River
recalled the effort involved in handling the unwieldy photographic equipment:
"The camera in its strong box was a heavy load to carry up the rocks, but it was
nothing to the chemical and plate-holder box, which in turn was feather weight
compared to the imitation hand organ which served as a darkroom." Mishaps along
the way were not uncommon. "The silver bath had gotten out of order," reported
one of Powell's party, "and the horse bearing the camera fell off a cliff and landed
on top of the camera ... with a result that need not be described."

promised to provide the public with the foods needed to discover their own
hidden treasures. Such appeal to prejudices led historian Sam Warner to
remark that Riis ascribed a "degree of opprobrium to each group directly
proportional to the distance from Denmark."
216 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Yet for all that, Riis retained a measure of sympathy and understanding
for the poor. He did not work his way out of poverty only to find a quiet
house far from the turmoil of the urban scene. He was unable to ignore
the squalor that so evidently needed the attention of concerned Americans.
Thus an ambivalence permeated Riis's writings. On the one hand, he sym­
pathized with the plight of the poor and recognized how much they were
the victims of their slum environment. "In the tenements all the elements
make for evil," he wrote. He struggled to maintain a distinction between the
"vicious" classes of beggars, tramps, and thieves and the working poor who
made the slum their home because they had no other choice. On the other
hand, Riis could not avoid using language that continuously dismissed whole
classes of immigrants as inherently unable to adapt themselves to what he
considered acceptable American behavior.
Of southern- and eastern-Mediterranean people, Riis was the least
understanding. The "happy-go-lucky" Italians, he observed, were "con­
tent to live in a pig sty." Not only did they "come in at the bottom," but
they also managed to stay there. They sought to reproduce the worst of
life in Italy by flocking to slum tenements. When an Italian found better
housing, "he soon reduced what he did find to his own level, if allowed to
follow his natural bent." These affable and malleable souls "learned slowly,
if at all." And then there was the passion for gambling and murder: "[The
Italian's] soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on the table,
and very frequently his knife is in it too before the game is ended." Such
observations confirm our sense of Riis as a tourist in the slums, for he
seemed only to have educated his prejudices without collecting objective
information.
A second quality that strikes the reader of How the Other HalfLives is its
tone of Christian moralism. Riis was no radical or socialist. He blamed the
condition of the urban poor on the sins of individuals-greedy landlords,
petty grafters, corrupt officials, the weak
Riis blamed the condition character of the poor, and popular indiffer­
of the urban poor on the sins ence. Insensitive to the economic forces that
of individuals had transformed cities, he never attempted
a systematic analysis of urban conditions.
Instead, he appealed to moral regeneration as the means of overcoming evil
and approvingly cited the plea of a philanthropic tenement builder: "How
are these men and women to understand the love of God you speak of, when
they see only the greed of men?" In his own ominous warning to his fellow
New Yorkers, Riis struck an almost apocalyptic note: "When another gen­
eration shall have doubled the census of our city," he warned, "and to the
vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall
be a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?" If conditions worsened, the
violence of labor strikes during the 187 Os and 1880s might seem quite tame
1n comparison.
. .
 The Mirror with a Memory 217

Bohemian cigar makers at work in their tenement

Given those predispositions, how do we interpret Riis's photographs?

Like the arrangers of family albums, his personal interests dictated the kinds
of photographs he included in his books. And as with the family albums, by
being aware of these predispositions we can both understand Riis better by
consciously examining his photographic messages and at the same time tran­
scend the original intent of the pictures.
For example, Riis's Christian moralism led hlm to emphasize the need
for stable families as a key to ameliorating slum conditions. Many American
Protestants in his audience thought of the home and family as a haven from
the bustle of the working world as well as a nursery of piety and good mor­
als. Fathers could return at the end of the day to the warm, feminine envi­
ronment in which their children were carefully nurtured. Thus the picture
we have already examined of the "five cents a spot" lodging takes on added
significance in light of these concerns. It is not simply the lack of cleanliness
or space that would make such an apartment appalling to many viewers, but
the corrosive effect of such conditions on family life. Yet this building was
a fiunily dwelling, for Riis heard a baby crying in the adjoining hall-room.
218 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

How could a family preserve any semblance of decency, Riis asked his read­
ers, in a room occupied by twelve single men and women?
Let us turn from that photograph to the one on the previous page, which
is more obviously a family portrait. The middle-class Protestant viewer of
Riis's day would have found this picture shocking as well. The home was
supposed to be a haven away from the harsh workaday world, yet here the
factory has invaded the home. This small room of an immigrant Bohemian
family is crowded with the tools and supplies needed to make a living. The
business is apparently a family enterprise, since the husband, wife, and at
least one child assist in the work. Although the young boy cannot keep
his eyes off the camera, he continues to stretch tobacco leaves from the pile
on his lap.
The room speaks of a rather single-minded focus on making a living. All
the furnishings are used for cigar making, not for creature comforts or living
after work. The only light comes from a small kerosene lamp and the indirect
sunlight from two windows facing out on the wall of another building. Yet Riis
had a stronger message for the picture to deliver. The text stresses the exploi­
tation of Bohemians in New York, most of whom worked at cigar making in
apartments owned by their employers, generally Polish Jewish immigrants.
It is interesting to contrast the portrait of the Bohemian family with a
different family portrait, this one taken by another reforming photographer,
but still often published in reprints of How the Other HalfLives.* Unlike the
photograph of the cigar makers' lodging, the photograph on page 219 is
a more formal family portrait. Very much aware of the camera' s presence,
everyone is looking directly at the lens. Perhaps the photographer could
gain consent to intrude on their privacy only by agreeing to do a formal
photograph. The children have been scrubbed and dressed in what appear to
be their good clothes-the oldest son in his shirt and tie, his sister in a taf­
feta dress, and a younger girl in a frock. Unlike the "five cents a spot" lodg­
ing, where dishes were stacked one upon the other, here the family china is
proudly displayed in the cabinet. Perhaps it was a valued possession carefully
guarded on the journey from Europe.
Other details in the picture suggest that this family enjoyed a more pleas­
ant environment than was seen in the previous photos. We notice on the
left a gas stove, a relatively modern improvement in an age when coal and
wood were still widely used for heating and cooking. Perhaps these people
had found a room in a once-elegant home divided by the realtor into a mul­
tiple dwelling. Certain details suggest that may be the case. Few tenements
would have had gas, much less built-in cupboards or the finished moldings
around doors and windows. The window between the kitchen-bedroom
and closet-bedroom indicates that the room may have once looked out on
open space.

*The photographer is Jessie Tarbox Beals, and the picture was taken in 1910. Although not included
in the original edition of Huw the Other HalfLives, it is among the photographs in the Riis Collection
held by the Museum of the City of New York.
 The Mirror with a Mfm()ry 219

Room in a tenement ftat, 1910

By contrast, the picture communicates a sense of crowding. This image

hardly seems an accident. Had the photographer wished to take only a fam­
ily portrait, she could have clustered her subjects in the center of her lens.
Instead, she placed them around the room so that the camera would catch
all the details of their domestic circumstance. We see not just a family, but
the conditions of their lives in an area far too small for their needs. Each
space and almost all the furnishings are used for more than one purpose.
The washtub just before the window and washboard behind it indicate that
the kitchen doubles as a laundry room-and the tub was probably used for
baths as well. The bed serves during the day as a sofa. To gain a measure
of privacy, the parents have crowded their bed into a closet stuffed with
family possessions. Seven people seem to share a room perhaps no more
than 2 5 0 square feet in total. The children appear to range in age from one
to twelve.
This portrait, then, does not conform to the stereotype we would expect to
find of urban immigrant slum-dwellers. In the first place, many immigrants
came to America without families. Of those, a majority were young men who
hoped to stay just long enough to accumulate a small savings with which to
improve their family fortunes upon returning to Europe. On the other hand,
immigrant families tended to be much larger than those of middle-class,
220 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

native-born Americans. Rather than evoking a sympathetic response among

an American audience, the picture might instead reinforce the widespread
fear that prolific breeding among foreign elements threatened white Protes­
tant domination of American society.
What, then, does the modern viewer derive from this family portrait?
Overall, it seems to say that immigrants, like other Americans, prized
family life. The father perches at the center almost literally holding his
family together, though with a rather
Immigrants, like other tenuous grip. The son with his tie appears
Americans, prizedfamily life. to embody the family's hopes for a better
future. His mother securely holds the baby
in her arms. Each element, in fact, emphasizes the virtues of the domestic
family as it was traditionally conceived in America. The picture, while send­
ing a mixed message, conveys less a sense of terrible slum conditions than
a sense of the middle-class aspirations among those forced to live in inad­
equate housing.
Does the fact that the picture is posed make it less useful as histori­
cal evidence? Not at all. Even when people perform for the camera, they
communicate information about themselves. There is no hiding the dif­
ficulty of making a decent life for seven people in a small space. Nor can
the viewer ignore the sense of pride of person and place, no matter how
limited the resources. What remains uncertain, however, is what message
the photographer meant to convey. The scene could serve equally well to
arouse nativist prejudice or to extol the strength of family ties in the immi­
grant community . Both were concerns that Riis addressed in his writing
and photographs.
Concern over the breakdown of family life drew Riis to children. They
are among his most frequently photographed subjects. He shared the Vic­
torian notion of childhood innocence and therefore understood that noth­
ing could be more disturbing to his middle-class audience than scenes of
homeless children, youth gangs, and "street arabs" sleeping in alleys, gut­
ters, and empty stairways. At first glance, the three "street arabs" pictured
on page 221 appear as if they might even be dead. A closer look suggests
helpless innocence-children alone and unprotected as they sleep. Their
ragged clothes and bare feet advertise poverty and the absence of parents
to care for them. In each other, though, they seem to have extracted a
small measure of warmth, belonging, and comfort. It would be almost
impossible for any caring person to view the picture without empathy
for its subjects and anger at a society that cares so little for its innocent
creatures.
Riis hints at his sympathies through the location of the camera. He did
not stand over the boys to shoot the picture from above. That angle would
suggest visually the superiority of the photographer to his subjects. From
ground level, however, observer and subject are on the same plane. We look
at the boys, not down on them. And should we dismiss as accidental his
 TbeMirrorwithaMemory 221

"Stteet arabs" in sleeping quarters

inclusion of the prisonlike bars over the small window? From another angle
Riis could have eliminated that poignant symbol from his frame.
Certainly, we know that Riis feared that all too soon those "innocents"
would become the members of slum gangs, operating outside the law with
brazen disregard for society or its values. In a second picture of lost inno­
cence on page 222, Riis persuaded some gang members to demonstrate how
they "did the trick"-that is, robbed the pockets of a drunk lying in an alley.
The mere fact that Riis had obviously arranged the content of the picture,
indicating that some relationship existed between the photographer and his
subjects, would have made the image even more shocking. These young men
were clearly proud of their acts and so confident that they were beyond the
reach of the law that they could show off for the camera. We see smiles and
smug satisfaction on their faces. Other members (not shown) gather around
to enjoy the novelty of the situation. Riis's audience would have understood
quite clearly that the slums as breeding grounds for crime drove the inno­
cence out of childhood.
Space was scarce not only in the homes of the poor. Crowding extended
into public places as well. Without parks or wide streets, children were
forced to play in filthy alleys and garbage heaps. Adults had no decent
communal space in which to make contact with the community. The pic­
ture of a tenement yard on page 223 immediately reveals a scene of chaos
and crowding. As in slum apartments, every open area had to serve more
222 APTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Hell,s Kitchen boys - "Showing Their Tricks,,

than one purpose. Women doing the wash and children playing appear
to fall all over one another. The fire escape doubles as a balcony. Any
of Riis's readers with a small yard, separate laundry room or laundress,
and nearby park surely thanked their good fortune not to be part of this
confusion.
Once again, however, closer scrutiny may lead us to reconsider our initial
impressions. This place seems alive with energy. We see that the women and
children are all part of a community. They have given their common space,
restticted as it may be, to shared activities. Everyone seems to have a place in
the scheme of things. All that laundry symbolizes a community concern with
cleanliness and decency. On the balcony some people have flower boxes to
add a touch of color and freshness to the drab landscape. Our initial shock.
gives way to a more complex set of feelings. We come to respect the durabil­
ity of spirit that allowed people to struggle for a small measure of comfort
amid such harsh surroundings. The message that at first seemed obvious is
not so clear after all.
 The Mirror with a Mmwry 22 3

Tenement-house Yard

In the photograph titled "Bottle Alley," on page 224, Riis has editorial­
ized on the same theme with more telling effect. In this dingy slum, along
the infamous Bend, we are still among tenements. Laundry again hangs
from the balcony. A few isolated men look upon the camera as it takes in the
scene. Their presence during the day suggests they are among the army of
224 AFna THE FACT: TBE ART 01 HlSToRICAL DETECTION

"Bottle Alleyn

unemployed who sit aimlessly waiting for time to pass. They seem oblivious
to the filth that surrounds them. We cannot help but feel that they are as
degraded as the conditions in which they live. The dilapidated buildings and
rickety stairs create an overall sense of decay; nothing in the picture relieves
the image of poverty and disorder Riis wanted to capture. The message is all
too clear.
As Jacob Riis and his camera demonstrate, photography is hardly a simple
"mirror of reality." The meanings behind each image must be uncovered
through careful exploration and analysis. On the surface, certainly, photo­
graphs often provide the historian with a wealth of concrete detail. In that
sense they do convey the reality of a situation with some objectivity. Yet
Riis's relative inexperience with a camera did not long prevent him from
learning how to frame the content to create a powerful image. The photo­
graphic details communicate a stirring case for social reform, full of subjec­
tive as well as objective intent. Riis did not simply want us to see the poor or
the slums; he wanted us to see them as he saw them. His view was that of a
partisan, not an unbiased observer.
 The Mirror with a Memory 22 5

In that sense the photographic "mirror" is silvered on both sides, catch­

ing the reflections of its user as well as its subjects. The prints that emerge
from the twilight of the darkroom must be read by historians as they do all
evidence-appreciating messages that may be simple and obvious or com­
plex and elusive. Once these evidentiary limits are appreciated and accepted,
the historian can recognize the rueful justice in Oliver Wendell Holmes's
definition of a photograph: an illusion with the "appearance of reality that
cheats the senses with its seeming truth."
226 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

Readers wishing to examine more visual evidence from Jacob Riis's How the
Other Half Lives should consult the Dover Publications edition (New York,
1971) of his book. It includes 100 photographs and several reproductions of
line illustrations from the original version. Another edition of How the Other
Half Lives (Cambridge, MA, 1970) has an excellent introduction by urban
historian Sam Bass Warner but suffers because of a limited number of pho­
tos. A more comprehensive collection is Robert J. Doherty, ed., The Com­
plete Photographic Work ofJacob Riis (New York,1987). The Riis photographs
are also available on microfiche from the International Archives of Photog­
raphy (New York, 1981). Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: Photography of Urban
America, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia, 1984), offers a persuasive interpretation
of Riis's place in the tradition of urban photography and social reform.
Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Expo­
sure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York (New York,
2007), evaluate Riis both as a reformer and as a photographer. Riis's auto­
biographic account of his life is found in Roy Lubove, ed., The Making of
an American (New York, 1966). An interesting but dated biography exists
in Louise Ware,Jacob A. Riis, Police Reporter (New York,1938); see also the
more recent study by Edith P. Mayer, "Not Chariry But Justice": The Story of
Jacob A. Riis (New York, 1974). One of America's finest photographers and
critics,Ansel Adams,has also done the preface to an important book on Riis:
Alexander Alland,Jacob Riis: Photographer and Citizen (Millerton, NY , reis­
sued 1993).
Even for those readers whose photographic expertise is limited to a mas­
tery of George Eastman's injunction ("You press the button . . . "),a number
of books provide clear discussions of the photographic medium,its potenti­
alities, and its limitations. Susan Sontag, in her On Photography (New York,
1977), provides many stimulating ideas, particularly in her first essay, "In
Plato's Cave," and most recently, she reconsidered some of those ideas in
Regarding the Pain of Others (New York,2 003 ). All followers of photographic
art owe a debt to Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839
to the Present Day (New York, 1964), and Robert Taft, Photography and the
American Scene (New York, 1938; reissued 1964). For views that contrast
with Riis's scenes of New York,see the Museum of the City of New York's
Once Upon a Ciry: New York from1890to1910(New York,1958).
One significant pleasure in a field as untapped as photographic evidence
comes from doing original research yourself. Many photographs of historic
value are on file and readily available to the public in the Library of Con­
gress Prints and Photographs Division and the National Archives Still Pic­
ture Branch. Readers may download them from the Library of Congress's
American Memory Weh site (http://memory.loc.gov). Almost all readers
will have access to family albums,yearbooks,newspaper files,Weh sites,and
other sources from which to do their own investigating.
PAST AND PRESENT

Why Can't I See Them Now?

People marveled in the 1880s at the miracle that George Eastman's Kodak
system wrought. They pointed the lens, pushed the button, and sent the
camera off to Eastman's factory to have their pictures developed. Soon,
they had their cameras back, loaded with a new roll of film. No heavy gear,
messy chemicals, or finicky darkrooms. So imagine how home photogra­
phers felt some sixty years later when Edwin Land invented his Polaroid
"Land" camera. Point, shoot, open the back of the camera, and pull off
the developed photograph. Near instant gratification. Land had solved the
problem many parents faced when their children asked, "Why can't I see
them now?"
Could Land top that achievement? In 1972 he did, as Polaroid introduced
the SX-70, an instant color camera. Where the original Land camera used
roll film, the SX-70 used a square cartridge, which emitted a color picture
that developed automatically once the shot was taken. As one art critic com­
mented, "Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the cam­
era conjuring up what was right before one's eyes, right before one's eyes."
Some users complained because they could not make copies of the original.
But for police photographers, that shortcoming became a virtue. When they
took a mug shot or photographed a crime scene, no shady lawyer could sug­
gest that the pictures had been doctored.
Thirty-five years after Land's miracle, Polaroid disappeared, driven out
of business by digital cameras. These electronic wizards offer gratification
that is even more instant and less complicated. If a picture disappoints, hit
the delete button and shoot again without wasting film. Digital cameras
have become so miniaturized they fit into cell phones that give almost any­
one the ability to communicate images to distant places with unpredictable
possibilities.
In late April 2004, for example, U.S. television news-magazine 60 Min­
utes II broke a story involving abuse and humiliation of Iraqi inmates at Abu

Ghraib prison. The story included photographs showing prisoners being

tormented. Where did these incriminating images come from? Guards and

227
22 8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

soldiers at Abu Ghraib had routinely used their cell phone cameras to send
photos of their activities back to friends and family at home. The result­
ing scandal shocked the nation and damaged the claim that the United
States had a humanitarian mission in Iraq. The military learned its lesson,
however. It banned soldiers from bringing cell phone cameras into Iraq.
The "mirror with a memory" can also open windows into the dark corners
of our lives.
CHAPTER IO

USDA Government Inspected

They claimed to use every bit of the pig "except the squeal. " Were
meatpackers business visionaries or a threat to public health whose
industry required public regulation?

An our essays tell a story, and this one is no exception. But our present tale,
by its very nature, partakes in large measure of the epic and the symbolic. It
is a political tale, compiled largely from the accounts of politicians and the
journalists who write about politicians; which is to say, it possesses much of
the stuff of a good, robust fairy tale. As we shall shortly discover, there are
logical reasons for such larger-than-life overtones, and they deserve serious
scrutiny. But the story must come first: an exciting tale of a bold president,
an earnest reformer, some evil political bosses, and a lot of pork and beef. It
begins ("once upon a time") with the president, Teddy Roosevelt, who turns
out to be the hero of the tale. There was nothing ordinary about Teddy,
including the fact that he was ever president at all. People from the Roos­
evelts' social class disdained politics and would never encourage their sons to
take it up as a profession. But then again, Teddy was not like other members
of his social class, nor like his fellow students at Harvard. Anything he did,
he did with gusto, and if being the best meant being president, then Teddy
would not stop short of the White House.
His path to success was not an easy one. As a child Teddy was sickly,
asthmatic, and nearsighted. He spent long hours pummeling punching bags,
swinging on parallel bars, doing push-ups, and boxing in the ring to build
a body as robust as his mind. When he went west in the 1880s to take up
ranching, he had to overcome his image as an effete eastern "dude." He soon
amazed many a grizzled cowboy by riding the Dakota badlands in spring
mud, blasts of summer heat, and driving winter storms. He fought with
his fists and once rounded up a band of desperados at gunpoint. Back East,
when Teddy played tennis, he showed the same determination, his record
being ninety-one games in a single day. When he led the Rough Riders
through Cuba in 1898, he raised troop morale by walking the sentry line,
whistling cheerfully while his men crouched low to avoid the bullets flying
overhead. As president he advised others to speak softly and carry a big stick,
though he himself more often observed only the latter half of his maxim.

229
230 A:fn:R T.BE FACT: THE ART OP HlSTOBICAL DETECTION

TR, displaying characteristic gritted teeth and holding a moderately big stick.
'When he spoket Roosevelt chopped every word into neat, staccato syllables, with a
rhythm that bore no resemblance to the ordinary cadences of the English language.
"I always think of a man biting tenpenny nails when I think of Roosevelt making a
speech," remarked one acquaintance.

Teddy's favorite expressions, seldom spoken softly, were "Bully!'' and "Dee
lighted!"-uttered because he usually got his way.
By 1906 Teddy had the White House firmly in his grasp.Just two years
earlier he had won a resounding victory. His many achievements included
the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese
War. But Teddy could never rest on his laurels. In February a storm broke
that challenged his skill as leader of both the nation and the Republican
Party.
The thunderclap that shattered the calm was the publication of TheJungle.
The book told a lurid tale about Chicago's meatpacking industry. Its author,
Upton Sinclair, was not only a reformer but
a socialist as well. Most Americans of the day
The Jungle told a lurid
believed that socialists were dangerous people
who held extreme and impractical opinions.
tale about Chicago}­
Despite that skepticism, readers could not meatpacking ind'USl:ry.
ignore the grisly realities recounted in The
Jungle. It related, in often revolting detail, the conditions under which the
packers processed pork and beef, adulterated it, and shipped it to millions
of American consumers. Breakfast sausage, Sinclair revealed, was more than
 USDA Gwernmmt Inspected 231

Hogs being scalded preparatory to scraping at a Swift and Company plant, 1905.
The packers boasted that they used every hit of the pig "except the squeal," and
they were probably more than right, given some of the extraneous ingredients that
went into the canned goods of the period. Although modem viewers may he taken
aback at the unsanitary appearance of the plant, this photograph was a promotional
shot illustrating some of the better conditions in packing facilities.

a tasty blend of ground meats and spices. "It was too dark in these storage
spaces to see clearly," he reported,

but a man could run his hands over the piles of meat and swap off handfulls
of dry dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put out
poisoned bread for them; they would die; and then rats, bread, and meat would
go in the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would
be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling did not trouble to
lift out a rat even when he saw one.
232 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Rats were but one tasty additive in the meat sent to dinner tables. Potted
chicken contained no chicken at all, only beef suet, waste ends of veal, and
tripe. Most shocking of all, Sinclair told of men in cooking rooms who fell
into vats and, after being cooked for days, "all but the bones had gone out
into the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!"
In just one week a scandalized public had snapped up some 25,000 cop­
ies of The Jungle. Most readers missed the socialist message. Sinclair had
hoped to draw their attention to "the conditions under which toilers get
their bread." The public had responded instead to the disclosures about cor­
rupt federal meat inspectors, unsanitary slaughterhouses, tubercular cattle,
and the packers' unscrupulous business practices.
No reader was more outraged than President Theodore Roosevelt. Few
politicians have ever been as well informed as TR, who devoured books at
more than 1,500 words per minute, published works of history, and cor­
responded with the opinion makers of his day. Roosevelt recognized imme­
diately that the public would expect government at some level-local, state,
or federal-to clean up the meat industry. He invited Sinclair for a talk at
the White House, and though he dismissed the writer's "pathetic belief" in
socialism, he promised that "the specific evils you point out shall, if their
existence be proved, and if I have the power, be eradicated."
Roosevelt kept his promise. With the help of allies in Congress, he quickly
brought out a new bill, along with the proverbial big stick. Only four months
later, on June 30, he signed into law the Meat Inspection Act that banned the
packers from using any unhealthy dyes, chemical preservatives, or adulter­
ants. The bill provided $3 million toward a new, tougher inspection system,
one in which government inspectors could be on hand day or night to con­
demn animals unfit for human consumption. Senator Albert Beveridge of
Indiana, Roosevelt's progressive ally in Congress, gave the president credit
for the new bill. "It is chiefly to him that we owe the fact that we will get as
excellent a bill as we will have," he told reporters. Once again, Americans
could put canned meats and sausages on the dinner table and eat happily
ever after. Or so it would seem.

THE SYMBOLS OF POLITICS

The story you have just read is true-as far as it goes. It has taken on a leg­
endary, even mythic quality in the telling. Politics is, after all, public busi­
ness. And the public, especially in that era, treated their politicians a bit like
celebrities, with the result that the tales of national politics almost inescap­
ably took on epic proportions. In such situations, symbolic language serves
to simplify highly complex realities. It makes those realities more compre­
hensible by substituting concrete and recognizable actors and objects in the
place of complicated, though often ordinary, situations. In doing so, sym­
bols and symbolic language serve as a means of communication between
political leaders and their constituencies. Skillful politicians generally have
 USDA Government Inspected 23 3

Boss 'William Tweed of New York, in life and in art. During the latter half of
the nineteenth century, cartoons played an important part in defining the symbols
of political discourse. Occasionally the representations were readily recognizable
in more than a symbolic sense. 'When Tweed fled the United States to escape a jail
term, he was arrested in an out-of-the-way Spanish village. The Spanish constables,
it tamed out, had recognized him from this Thomas Nast cartoon. The symbolic
aspect of the drawing escaped them, however; they thought they had apprehended a
notorious child kidnapper.

the ability to dramatize their actions so as to appear to address deeply felt

public concerns.
Jacksonian Democrats pioneered many of the modem uses of campaign
imagery. They touted their candidate, Old Hickory, as the symbolic embodi­
ment of the American frontier tradition. In their hands Jackson became the
uncommon "Common Man." As president, he waged war against the Second
Bank of the United States, fittingly symbolized by its enemies as the Monster
Bank.. His Whig opposition had quickly grasped the use of such symbols;
they nominated a popular general of their own, William Henry "Tippeca­
noe" Harrison. Their campaign rhetoric invoked a log-cabin motif and other
appropriate frontier images, although in reality Harrison came from a dis­
tinguished Virginia family and lived in an elegant house. Thus, along with a
two-party system of politics, Americans had developed a body of symbols to
make complex political issues familiar and comprehensible to the voters.
234 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Symbols as a mode of political discourse took on a new power in a form

that matured in the late nineteenth century: the political cartoon. Earlier car­
toonists had portrayed Old Hickory's epic struggle with the Monster Bank,
but they lacked the sophistication and draftsmanship achieved by Gilded
Age caricaturists such as Thomas Nast. Week after week, newspapers car­
ried cartoons that established readily identifiable symbols. Nast conceived
the elephant as a representation of the GOP (the Republicans, or Grand Old
Party) and the donkey for the Democrats. To Nast and his fellow cartoon­
ists we owe our image of the Political Boss, decked out in his gaudy suit
that assumes a striking resemblance to a convict's striped outfit. So, too, we
have the Monopolist, or greedy capitalist, his huge, bloated waistline taking
on the aspect of a bag of silver dollars. A scraggly beard, overalls, and wild,
crazed eyes denoted the Populist. In place of the Monster Bank stood the
Trust, vividly pictured as a grasping octopus. Such cartoons by their very
nature communicated political messages of their day.
The cartoonists seldom had a better subject than Teddy Roosevelt. His
gleaming, oversized front teeth, bull neck, pince-nez glasses, and, of course,
big stick begged to be caricatured. Cartoonists did not have to stretch the
imagination to cast Teddy larger than life; he specialized in that department
long before he reached the White House.
He offered himself up as the gun-toting
Cartoonists did not have to
cowboy, the New York police commis­
stretch the imagination to cast
sioner in his long, black cape, and the
Rough Rider charging up Tea Kettle Teddy larger than life.
Hill. Thus it was easy during the political
battles of the Progressive Era to conceive of the actors in symbolic terms. In
one corner stood the reformers: Roosevelt, a policeman, clubbing the oppo­
sition with his big stick; or Sinclair, wild-eyed like all political radicals. In the
other corner, during the meat-inspection fight, stood the Beef Trust: Armour,
Swift, and the other packers, with their "public-be-damned" attitudes.
Yet as we have already noted, such symbolic representations inevitably
oversimplify the political process to the point of distortion. As rendered by
the cartoonist, shades of gray become black and white. Even more subtly,
distortion arises because symbols come to personalize complex situations
and processes. Inanimate institutions (trusts, political machines, Congress)
appear as animate objects (a grasping octopus, predatory tigers, braying don­
keys) with human motives and designs.
Consequently, we tend to visualize political events as the result of indi­
viduals' actions. The story of the meat-inspection law is reduced to the tale
of Roosevelt, Sinclair, and their enemies. The tale, as we saw, is quite simple:
(1) Sinclair's revelations scandalize the president; (2) Roosevelt determines
to reform the meatpacking industry; (3) with his usual energy, Roosevelt
overwhelms the opposition and saves the consumer.
Such an explanation masks the crucial truth that the actors-whether
individuals, groups, or institutions-often have complicated motives and
confused objectives. The outcome of a situation may bear slight resemblance
 USDA Government Inspected 23 5

J '

J
'
�.

--z:.rn�ii lllli'ln Wlll.W1 "Qi'tll

, gtw; B'Pi' P
1•1:N!il;- �· 1!rit II h
l Wilf b1 Lil' piq: IAL'-;·ulp •hL laalpr.t1 b1'71dP. 11

Caricaturists had a field day with Roosevelt's energetic and good-natured

self-aggrandizement. In this cartoon by Frederick Opper, Vice-President-Elect
Roosevelt has rearranged the inaugural parade of 1901 so that President William
McKinley is forced to bring up the rear. Teddy, of course, displays his teeth as well
as a load of hunting trophies from western exploits, while the characteristic Trust
figure looms in the background as "Willie's Papa."

to the original design of any of the participants. As a result, symbolic expla­

nations do not adequately portray the process through which political actors
turn their intentions, both good and bad, into law.
Political historians, then, must handle symbolic language and explana­
tions with caution. They cannot simply dismiss or debunk the symbolism,
for it can, by influencing opinion, affect the political process. At the same
2 36 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

time, historians cannot allow symbols to obscure the information neces­

sary to narrate and explain political events. Granted, Roosevelt played the
reformer in seeking to curb the packers' worst abuses, but how successfully
did he translate his intentions into an effective political instrument? Sena­
tor Beveridge, it is true, praised both the new law and the president's role
in securing its passage, yet other supporters of inspection reform did not
share Beveridge's enthusiasm. "The American consumer and the ordinary
American farmer have been left out of the question," Senator Knute Nelson
complained shortly after the act passed. "I must say I feel disappointed....
When I go home I will go home like a licked dog."
In fact,prominent Republicans in the Senate,led by Beveridge himself and
Roosevelt's good friend Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, had fought
to defeat the law only a few days before Roosevelt signed it. They believed,
as Nelson had argued,that the bill was intended "to placate the packers; next
to placate the men who raise cattle; and, third to get a good market for the
packers abroad." In short,many senators viewed the Meat Inspection Act as
a victory for the packers and a defeat for reform. In that light, Beveridge's
praise has a symbolic meaning that our story thus far cannot explain.
So the historian must seek to set aside the mythic story and its symbols in
order to reconstruct the way in which the real story unfolded.The outcome
must be treated not as the inevitable triumph of good over evil but as just
one of the many possible outcomes and not necessarily the best at that.The
political historian's task is also to determine how the complex procedural
tangle by which a bill becomes law limits the impact of individual actors no
matter how lofty or base their motives.

THE TANGLE BEHIND THE JUNGLE

The mythic tale of the Meat Inspection Act begins with the publication of
The Jungle in February 1906. That, so the story goes, sparked the outrage
against the packers and their unscrupulous methods.Yet although as many
as one million people read The Jungle, we may legitimately wonder whether
a single book could by itself generate such widespread controversy.For bet­
ter or worse,we have no opinion polls from 1906 to measure public response
to Sinclair's lurid expose. But if we poke around in earlier stories about the
meat industry, we find that The Jungle was merely a final chapter, albeit a
telling one,in a long train of unfavorable stories about the packers.
As early as the 1870s, some European governments had begun to ban
what they had found to be unhealthy American meat products. Over the
years American exports declined as the Europeans tightened their restric­
tions. In 1891 the worried packers persuaded Congress to pass a federal
meat-inspection act in order to win back their foreign customers. The fed­
eral stamp would show that all meats in interstate and foreign sales had
been subjected to antemortem (preslaughter) inspection.That measure suc­
ceeded until 1897,when "embalmed meat " scandals renewed outrage at the
 USDA Gwernment Inspected 23 7

Roosevelt with his Rough Riders. TR's distrust of the packers reached as far back
as the Spanish-American War, when packers had sold the American army quantities
of rotten and chemically adulterated meats. Humorist Finley Peter Dunne took
note of the situation-as well as the disorganized state of the regular army-when
he had his fictional Irish bartender, Mr. Dooley, remark on the invincible American
army of "injineers, miners, plumbers, an' lawn tinnis experts, numberin' in all four
hundhred an' eighty thousand men," sent to do battle against the Spanish "ar-rmed
with death-dealin' canned goods."

industry's unsavory practices. A few unscrupulous packers had supplied the

army fighting in Cuba with rotten and chemically adulterated meats. As the
commander of the Rough Riders, Colonel Teddy Roosevelt had seen troops
die from poisonous meats, as well as from Spanish bullets.
Roosevelt had not forgotten what he interpreted as treachery. In 1905 he
found an opportunity to punish the packers. He ordered his attorney general
to bring suit against the packinghouses under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The
president was particularly offended by what he viewed as the packers' brazen
disregard for public safety. Armour, Swift, and others boasted openly that
they used every bit of the pig "except the squeal." Roosevelt was therefore
beside himself when he heard that the judge had dismissed the government's
suit on narrow procedural grounds. Suspicious that the packers had resorted
to bribery, he instructed his attorney general to release a confidential report
238 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

revealing perjury in the Beef Trust case. Roosevelt scarcely needed to read
The Jungle to believe that with their public-be-damned attitude the meat bar­
ons might be guilty of any manner of irresponsible behavior. Furthermore,
the president recognized that the existing meat-inspection law left much to
be desired. Under it, Congress allocated money for an inspection force, but
never enough to do the job well. Given the limited funds, most inspectors
worked only during the day, leaving the packers free to commit their worst
abuses at night. Even if inspectors did find diseased cattle at antemortem
inspection, they had no power to have the animals destroyed. In fact, the
packers often sold those tainted animals to other plants not under federal
supervision.
The federal government actually had almost no authority over the pack­
ers. Nothing under the system forced compliance with government stan­
dards. The inspectors could only threaten to leave the premises (and take
their stamps with them) if the packers ignored their rulings. And though
the law did prevent the industry from exporting meat without the federal
stamp of approval, no similar provision protected American consumers.
Once a carcass passed the inspector, the government had no further power
to impose sanitary standards anywhere in the plants. Roosevelt was aware of
these deficiencies and eager to see them corrected.
The public, too, had grounds for suspicion. Sinclair's accusations had
already been published in a popular socialist journal. In doing his research,
Sinclair had received information from The Lancet, a distinguished British
medical journal that had investigated earlier meat-industry scandals. In 1905
The Lancet renewed its investigation of the packinghouses. Investigators
discovered filth that jeopardized both workers and consumers. At the same
time, Samuel Merwyn, a well-known muckraking journalist, had written
articles charging the packers with deliberately selling diseased meats.
Muckrakers like Merwyn had much in common with the political car­
toonists. Toward the turn of the century, journalists had discovered that the
public possessed an almost insatiable appetite for sensational stories. Muck­
rakers' investigations uncovered villains
who made convenient, easily recogniz­
Journalists discovered that
able symbols. Evil could be personified
the public possessed an
as the Monster Trust, the Self-Serving
Politician, or the Avaricious Capital­ almost insatiable appetite for
ist. These villains were much like the sensational stories.
greedy landlords Jacob Riis had con­
demned. Like Riis, muckrakers told Americans what was wrong with their
society, but with few suggestions about how to fix the problems. Somehow
the exposure of the symptoms of evil was supposed to motivate reformers
and an aroused public to cure the disease. In keeping with the popular style
of muckraking, Sinclair had pointed an accusing finger at the packers with­
out offering any specific suggestions for cleaning up the meat industry.
But just as The Jungle can be understood only within the context of the
muckraking era, so too the Meat Inspection Act stood within the context
 USDA Government Inspected 2 39

"An Alphabet ofJoyous Trusts" was

Frederick Opper's subject in a 1902 series
of cartoons. Predictably, "B" stood for
the Beef Trusts. The same Trust figure is
back (compare it with the one in Opper's
Roosevelt cartoon on page 000), although
here Opper plays on the monopolist's
traditional control over market prices
rather th.an on the unsanitary practices of
the packing industry.

of Progressive reform. Despite Sinclair's lack of analysis, many Americans

had identified the sources of such corporate arrogance and had prepared an
agenda for politics. Theodore Roosevelt embodied much of the tempera­
ment of those Progressive reformers. He shared their hostility to excessive
concentrations of power in private hands, their approval of executive regula­
tory agencies, their faith in democratic forms of government, their humani­
tarian sensibilities, and their confidence in the people's capacity to shape
their future intelligently.
The Progressives were actually a diverse group seeking to tum gov­
ernment at all levels into a weapon for social justice. They included rural
reformers, good-government and moral-uplift advocates, economic regula­
tors, antitrusters, and political liberals and conservatives. Roosevelt's faith in
traditional institutions might easily have led him to oppose the reformers,
but he was never a diehard conservative who railed against change. "The
only true conservative is the man who resolutely set his face to the future,"
he once told a Progressive supporter.
It was preoccupation with morality that brought the reform movement
together and that attracted Roosevelt to
A preoccupat:i<m with morallty Progressivism. "His life, he felt, was a
quest for the moral," wrote one biogra­
brought the reform movement
pher. The reformers of the early twenti­
together and attracted
eth century saw themselves rooting out
Roosevelt to ProgressiviS'lfl, . evil, which more often than not they
defined as "corporate arrogance.'' Seek­
ing to maximize profits, a railroad might leave a road crossing unguarded;
a water company might eliminate safeguards against typhoid fever. "Such
240 ArrER THE FACT! THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Chicago packers pioneered the moving (dis)assembly line. Live pigs were lifted
by their hind feet onto the overhead rail. Their throats were cut, and after they bled
to death, the carcasses moved along as each worker cut off a particular part until
virtually nothing was left. This process revolutionized work by reducing complex
operations to simple steps.

incidents made the corporation look like a killer," wrote historian David
Thelen. "These specific threats united all classes; anyone's child might be
careless at a railroad crossing; and typhoid fever was no respecter of social
origins."
Such problems were particularly acute because rapidly growing city pop­
ulations depended on processed foods. Other food industries had no better
sanitary standards than the meatpackers. Milk dealers, for example, regularly
increased their profits by diluting their product, using chalk, plaster, and
molasses to fortify the color and taste. A popular ditty of the day expressed
the widespread skepticism with processed foods:

Things are seldom what they seem;

Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Lard and soap we eat for cheese;
Butter is but axle grease.
 USDA Government Inspected 2 41

As a result, the public was prepared to think the worst of the meat indus­
try. The campaign for improved meat inspection had all the ingredients that
aroused Progressive ire. The packing industry fit Roosevelt's definition of a
"bad" trust, since its apparent disregard for even minimum health standards
threatened all classes of Americans.
Yet we must remember how politicians like to cast issues in black and white
terms. Were the packers the villains that reformers painted them to be? To
be fair, we should hear the packers' side of the case before we rush to judg­
ment. Some packers stated publicly that improved federal inspection was the
best way to restore public confidence in their products. J. Ogden Armour,
head of the packinghouse that bore his name, confidently invited the public
to visit local packing plants "to see for yourself how the hated packer takes
care of your meat supply." But he frankly admitted that "no packer can do an
interstate or export business without government inspection."
In their way, the packers were as revolutionary as the crazed socialists that
Roosevelt condemned. Over a twenty-year period the industry had funda­
mentally altered the way Americans bought and ate meat. Whereas at one
time customers would buy meat only from a local butcher, they now felt con­
fident eating meats prepared in distant packinghouses. To get meat safely to
consumers, the packers had invented the moving assembly line (disassembly
might be a better term as the engraving indicates), refrigerated railroad cars,
and a national marketing system. Urban consumers benefited because they
had a greater variety of meat products at lower costs.

Armour's Estimates of Dressed Beef By-Product

Costs and Profits

Steer, 1,260 lbs@ $3.25 per cwt* $ 40.95

(becomes 710 lbs dressed beef)

Cost of killing, processing, salt, icing, etc. 1.75

Freight on 710 lbs@ $0.45 per cwt 3.20
New York selling charges@ $0.35 per cwt 2.48
Costs of purchase, processing, and transport $ -48.38
Sale in NW of 710 lbs dressed beef@ 5 3/s ¢ per lb $ 38.17
(Net loss on dressed beef in NW) -$10.21
Sale of hide, 70 lbs@ $.09 per lb 6.30
Sale of by-products 4.50
Yield from all by-product sales 10.80
Net profit from all transactions 0.59

From Namre's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon. Copyright © 1991 by William Cronon.
Reprinted by permission ofW.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
*hundred-weight
242 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Packers had succeeded in large part because they used "everything but the
squeal." Put another way, packers made a profit from what local butchers
threw away. As one historian wrote, "[Armour] had built his empire on waste."
To reformers, "this seemed akin to making something out of nothing." Look
at the table on page 241, and you can see what these comments mean. Had
Armour sold only the dressed beef, how much money would he have lost per
head? Instead, the packers established chemical research labs that developed
products out of the wastes once flushed down the sewers. Margarine, bouil­
lon, brushes, combs, gut stringing, stearin (used in soap and candles), and
pepsin (to aid digestion) were among their innovations. They even found uses
for ground bones, dried blood, and hooves and feet (for glues). Today we
might praise the packers for their aggressive approach to recycling. Reform­
ers, however, mistook the careful attention to profit margins as corporate
greed and a disregard for public health. Much of what the packers sold to
make a profit the reformers thought they should throw away.
The innovative side of the packers' success was lost in the outcry over
The Jungle. Under the shadow Sinclair had cast, millions of Americans
altered their eating habits. Many foreign countries banned American meats.
An industry representative confessed that the loss of public confidence was
"hurting us very, very materially." The decline in both domestic and foreign
meat sales persuaded Armour that only improved inspection would save the
industry.
Thus the historical context surrounding meat-inspection reform reveals
that the dramatic appearance of The Jungle was only the most conspicuous­
and therefore the most obviously symbolic-event among a whole series of
developments. All the necessary ingredients were on hand to produce leg­
islation for a more stringent federal law. And on hand was Theodore Roos­
evelt, the master political chef who would whip all the ingredients into a dish
that consumers could taste with confidence.

THE LEGISLATIVE JuNGLE

In order for public outrage to find a constructive outlet, politicians must
channel it into law. And historians, for their part, must trace a path through
the congressional maze in order to see what compromises and deals shaped
the final bill. The legislative process is so constituted that willful minorities
can sometimes thwart the will of determined majorities. Skillful manipula­
tion of legislative procedures may allow senators and representatives to delay
the legislative process until support for a bill dissolves. It is during the legis­
lative phase that the historian discovers that support for improved inspection
was not so universal as it first seemed. Meat inspection, like many reforms
of the Progressive Era, raised issues more controversial than the question
of sanitary standards. Many of those larger issues affected the roles of the
individual actors. President Roosevelt, for example, had expressed his deter­
mination "to assert the sovereignty of the National Government by affirma­
tive action" against unchecked corporate wealth and power. When added to
 USDA Government Inspected 2 43

the Hepburn bill that allowed the government to set railroad shipping rates
and that included the Pure Food and Drug Act, a new meat-inspection bill
would mark a major extension of public regulatory authority over private
corporations.
Many people who favored improved inspection had given no indication
that they would accept Roosevelt's sweeping definition of executive author­
ity. The popular doctrine of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) placed the
burden for policing the marketplace on the consumer, not the government.
As recently as 1895, in the case of
The popular doctrine of caveat E. C. Knight, the Supreme Court had
severely restricted government regu­
emptor placed the burden for
lation of commerce. The packers, for
policing the marketplace on the
their part, had given no indication
consumer. that in agreeing to inspection reform
they would accept a bill that in any
way limited their control of the meat industry. Misguided rules might ruin
their business. So behind a mask of general agreement, many actors entered
the legislative process with conflicting motives and objectives. Much of that
conflict would be expressed not as disagreement on major legal or philo­
sophical issues, but as seemingly petty bickering over the details of the pro­
posed law.
To persuade conservatives to accept the tough bill he wanted, Roosevelt
knew he needed more ammunition than Sinclair's expose. His agricul­
ture secretary, James Wilson, had ordered an internal investigation of the
Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), which ran the inspection system. But Wil­
son and Roosevelt both suspected that the investigation would not "get to
the bottom of this matter." Therefore, they asked Commissioner of Labor
Charles P. Neill and New York attorney James Reynolds to undertake an
independent investigation. Both men had been active in "good government"
causes, though neither had any familiarity with the meat industry. Once they
reported back, Roosevelt would have the evidence he needed to determine
whether Sinclair or the meatpackers were the "malefactors" in this case.
Agriculture Department investigators whitewashed the BAI, just as Roos­
evelt suspected they would. Sinclair had grossly exaggerated conditions in the
plants and treated "the worst . . . which could be found in any establishment
as typical of the general conditions," the investigators charged. Although the
system could stand reforming, they argued that Sinclair's accusations were
"willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact."
Neill and Reynolds suggested, quite to the contrary, that if anything,
conditions in the packinghouses were even worse than Sinclair had claimed.
Their official report described slime and manure covering the walks leading
into the plants. The buildings lacked adequate ventilation and lighting. All
the equipment-the conveyors, meat racks, cutting tables, and tubs-rotted
under a blanket of filth and blood. Meat scraps for canning or sausages sat in
piles on the grimy floors. Large portions of ground rope and pigskin went
into the potted ham. Just as Sinclair had charged, foul conditions in the plant
244 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

proved harmful to the health of both the workers and the consumers of the
products they prepared.
The Neill-Reynolds report gave Roosevelt the big stick he liked to carry
into any political fight. Should the packers prove resistant, he could threaten
to make the secret report public. "It is absolutely necessary that we shall have
legislation which will prevent the recurrence of these wrongs," he warned. In
Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana he found a willing ally, already at work
on a new inspection bill. Beveridge, like Roosevelt, had caught the rising
tide of Progressive discontent over corporate misconduct. He sensed, too,
that leadership on this issue would win him the popular acclaim he craved.
Assisted by Agriculture Department experts, Beveridge had a bill drafted
by the middle of May 1906. He urged Roosevelt to pave the way for Senate
approval by releasing the damning Neill-Reynolds report.
For the moment, the politically adept Roosevelt heeded his own admoni­
tion to speak softly. For all his bluster, the president was generally a cautious
man. An unnecessary confrontation with the powerful Beef Trust offended
his sense of political practicality. Why waste his political ammunition if he
could have his way without a fight? "The matter is of such far-reaching
importance," he confided to Neill, "that it is out of the question to act hast­
ily." Besides, having once been a rancher himself, he was reluctant to injure
the livestock raisers, who bore no responsibility for the packers' scandalous
behavior.
The packers had indicated that they would resist efforts to regulate their
business, but had privately admitted that all was not well in their plants.
One had begged Neill to withhold his report, promising in return that the
packers would carry out any "reasonable, rational, and just recommenda­
tions" within thirty days. After that Neill and Reynolds would be free to
reexamine the plants. When Neill refused, packer Louis Swift rushed off to
confront the president. He found Roosevelt equally unsympathetic to any
scheme involving voluntary compliance. The president assured Swift that he
would settle for no less than legislation to "prevent the recurrence of these
wrongs."
Beveridge by now had his bill ready. On May 2, 1906, he introduced it
as a Senate amendment to the House Agriculture Appropriation Bill. Why,
we might well ask, did such a major reform make its debut as an amendment
tacked on to a House bill? Here, we begin to see how the legislative process
affects political outcomes. Beveridge recognized that effective inspection
required adequate funds. Previous congresses had undermined the system by
refusing to vote the money needed. Many smaller plants had no inspection
at all, and the largest ones had no inspectors at night. Beveridge, therefore,
had proposed to shift the funding from the small amount allotted in the
House Agriculture Appropriation Bill to a head fee charged for each animal
inspected. As the industry processed more animals, the funds for the Bureau
of Animal Industry would increase. But since the Constitution requires the
House to initiate all money bills, Beveridge had to amend a House bill pend­
ing before the Senate rather than introduce a separate measure.
 USDA Govemmmt Inspected 2 45

Following the public outcry, meatpackers tried to create a better image of

conditions in their plants and of the thoroughness of government inspection. In
fact, when this picture was taken in 1906, postmortem inspection, as shown here,
had not been at all common.

Beveridge included two other important changes. The old law did noth­
ing to force the packers to indicate on the label of canned meats either the
date on which they were processed or the actual contents. (Neill and Reyn­
olds, for example, discovered that the product called potted chick.en con­
tained no chicken at all.) The new law required dating and accurate labeling.
It also invested the secretary of agriculture with broad authority to estab­
lish regulations for sanitary standards in the plants. Inspectors could then
enforce those conditions as well as ensure the health of animals prior to and
after slaughtering. If the owners challenged an inspector, the secretary had
authority to make a "final and conclusive" ruling.
Yet this bill, which Beveridge confidently introduced in May, was hardly
the same bill Roosevelt signed on June 30, 1906. By then an annual $3-million
246 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

appropriation replaced the small head fee. No longer did the secretary of agri­
culture have "final and conclusive" authority. That authority was shifted to the
federal courts, which could review his rulings. And the final measure said noth­
ing about dating canned meats. In those discrepancies undoubtedly lies the
source of Senator Nelson's dismay with the outcome of the meat-inspection
battle. What the historian must now explain is why, if the reformers entered
the fray holding the high cards, they had given so much away.
In fact the battle had begun well for Roosevelt and Senate reformers.
When the packers first tried to stall Beveridge with promises to make vol­
untary improvements, the senator threatened them with more damaging
disclosures. To show he meant business, he had Neill brief representatives
for livestock raisers and western cattle-state senators on the contents of
his report. The packers had counted on those men as allies in their fight
against overly stringent federal regulation. But faced with the prospect of
more adverse publicity, the meat and cattle interests beat a hot retreat. The
Beveridge Amendment passed in the Senate without a single negative vote.
Never known for his modesty, Beveridge touted his measure as "the most
perfect inspection bill in the world."
Roosevelt hoped that the smashing Senate victory would lead to equally
swift action by the House. The packers, however, had no intention of giv­
ing up without a fight. In the House, they had far more substantial support,
particularly on the critical Agricul­
ture Committee. Its chairman, James The packers had no intention
Wadsworth, a Republican from New ofgiving up without a fight.
York, was himself a cattle breeder. He
regarded The Jungle as a "horrid, untruthful book" that, he claimed, had
temporarily unhinged the president. To orchestrate the opposition, Wads­
worth could count on the unflagging support of "Blond Billy" Lorimer, a
senior committee member, a notorious grafter, and the Republican repre­
sentative from Chicago's packinghouse district. The Beveridge bill roused
Lorimer like a red flag waved before a bull: "This bill will never be reported
by my committee-not if little Willie can help it."
The packers had another, even more powerful, ally-time. Summer
adjournment for Congress was only six weeks away. In the days before air
conditioning, most public officials left Washington to escape the oppressive
summer heat. While Congress vacationed, the public would most likely for­
get all about The Jungle, and as popular outrage waned, so would much of the
pressure for reform. Only new and more damaging disclosures could rekindle
the fervor that had swept Beveridge's amendment through the Senate. So
long as the Neill-Reynolds report remained secret, Roosevelt could save it as
a way to rekindle the public outcry. But by the time the Beveridge bill reached
the House, Sinclair had grown impatient. To goad the president, he published
new charges embellished with even more lurid details. Finally, unable to con­
tain his frustration, he leaked the details of the Neill-Reynolds report to the
New York Times, and newspapers across the country picked up the story. Hav­
ing lost its shock value, Roosevelt's big stick had become a twig.
 USDA Government Inspected 247

The packinghouse forces sensed the worst was behind them. They could
now afford to delay a vote on the Beveridge bill and in that way force reform­
ers to make vital concessions. The requirement for stringent labeling, packers
argued, would force the industry to abandon many well-known brand names.
Dating would prejudice consumers against perfectly healthy canned meats.
Nor could the packers abide investing such broad discretionary powers in
the secretary of agriculture. Such a step, one spokesman claimed, would in
effect "put our business in the hands of theorists, chemists, and sociologists,
etc., and the management and control taken away from men who devoted
their lives to the upbuilding and perfecting of this great American industry."
In short, the packers argued that the secretary's arbitrary authority could
deprive them of their property without the constitutional safeguard of due
process in the courts.
Although they were likely to gain materially from more effective inspec­
tion, the packers most objected to the imposition of head fees. Condemned
animals, they claimed, already cost them millions each year. Now the gov­
ernment proposed to saddle them with the additional burden of paying
inspectors' salaries. Given the thin margins on which they operated, even
a few pennies could make a difference. But that argument artfully con­
cealed another reason the packers opposed a self-financing system. As many
reformers pointed out, the small head fee (no more than 3 to 5 cents per
animal) could easily be passed on to consumers. But a more effective inspec­
tion service might force the packers to abandon some of their most profit­
able, if unhealthy, practices. They could, for example, reroute cattle rejected
at antemortem inspection to other parts of their plants. Furthermore, the
old law allowed the packers to undermine the inspection system whenever
it hurt profits, simply by arranging for their congressional allies, Lorimer
and Wadsworth, to cut the BAI budget in the name of government econ­
omy. Forced to lay off inspectors, the BAI could not effectively supervise the
plants. The Beveridge head-fee system eliminated that possibility. So what
seemed like a minor issue had the potential to make or break the new inspec­
tion system.
When the packers lobbied Congress, they shrewdly pitched their arguments
to other interests as well as their own. Control over annual appropriations
gives the House and its members much of their political clout. By making his
system self-financing, Beveridge would
Beveridge boasted that his bill have weakened the House's jealously
was "THE MOST PRONOUNCED guarded grip on federal purse strings,
EXTENSION OF FEDERAL depriving some congressional repre­
POWER IN EVERY DIRECTION sentatives of potential influence. Other
representatives who were traditional
EVER ENACTED. "
champions of private enterprise agreed
that restrictions on labels and dates, combined with the secretary of agricul­
ture's discretionary authority, constituted unwarranted government interfer­
ence in private enterprise. Beveridge had unwittingly reinforced his opponents'
claims when he boasted that his bill was "THE MOST PRONOUNCED EXTENSION
248 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

OF FEDERAL POWER IN EVERY DIRECTION EVER Representative

ENACTED."

E. D. Crumpacker of Indiana warned House members that "the passage of

the meat-inspection bill as it came from the Senate would mean the ultimate
federalization of every industry in the United States."
With support growing in the House and the damning Neill-Reynolds
report defanged, the packers went on the offensive. Wadsworth and Lorimer
introduced a substitute bill in late May that eliminated each feature the pack­
ers opposed. Dates on the cans were not required. In place of the head fee,
they had restored the annual appropriation. And in two other sweeping revi­
sions, they removed the proposed ban on interstate transportation of unin­
spected meats and gave packing firms the right to appeal any Agriculture
Department ruling to the federal courts. That last provision promised to be
the most destructive of all. By appealing each unfavorable decision to the
sympathetic courts, the packers could paralyze the inspection system.
The Wadsworth-Lorimer substitute outraged President Roosevelt. "It
seems to me," he wrote Wadsworth, "that each change is for the worse and
in the aggregate they are ruinous, taking every particle of good from the sug­
gested Beveridge amendment." He then made good on his threat to expose
the packers. On June 4 he sent the Neill-Reynolds report to Congress, along
with a sharply worded message calling for a stringent inspection bill.
As might have been expected, Roosevelt's message in no way routed the
packinghouse forces. Lorimer returned from a hasty trip to Chicago in time
to denounce the Neill-Reynolds report as a "gross exaggeration of condi­
tions." Armour accused the president of doing "everything in his power to
discredit them and their business." All that rhetoric, of course, was a part of
the symbolic language that so often monopolizes the public stage of politics.
Each side adopts an uncompromising posture and accuses the opposition of
all manner of villainy. The combatants strike heroic postures as champions
of a larger public or national interest. They use such "disinterested" allies
as Neill and Reynolds to legitimize their position. But at this point, when
no accommodation seems possible, the negotiation and compromise begin.
After all, both sides preferred some bill to no bill at all.
Faced with Roosevelt's demand for quick action, the House sent both
the Beveridge bill and the Wadsworth-Lorimer substitute measures to the
Agriculture Committee. In doing so, it followed a well-established proce­
dure for reviewing legislation through its committee system. Congress first
established committees to streamline its functioning. Rather than have the
entire body deliberate every bill, these smaller groups consider measures rel­
evant to their areas of special interest before making recommendations to
the entire House or Senate. A trade bill may go to the Commerce or Foreign
Relations Committees, a pork-barrel water project to the Rivers and Har­
bors Committee, and a farm bill to the Agriculture Committee. Those bills,
encompassing a variety of features, have to go through several committees.
All bills must eventually pass through the Rules Committee, which estab­
lishes parliamentary rules, such as the time allotted for floor debate or the
conditions for amendment.
 USDA Government Inspected 2 49

Yet if the committee system promotes efficiency, it also can provide an

undemocratic means to defeat a popular bill. Committees can eliminate or
amend central provisions or even refuse to return a bill to the floor for a
vote. In sending the Beveridge bill to the Agriculture Committee, the House
had routed it through an enemy stronghold. Wadsworth and Lorimer were
both members of the committee; they had only to gain ten of eighteen votes
from their colleagues in order to replace the Beveridge bill with their substi­
tute. Other members of the House might never have a chance to vote on the
original bill, even if a majority favored it.
Diligently, Wadsworth and Lorimer set out to undermine the Beveridge
bill. They opened their attack by holding committee hearings to which they
invited only witnesses sympathetic to the packers. As the hearings closed on
June 9, Wadsworth eked out a narrow margin of victory, his substitute bill
passing by only eleven to seven. Four
The president exploded when he Republicans had been so disgusted by
saw Wadsworth� handiwork. the "bullyragging" aimed at Neill and
Reynolds that they voted against the
substitute. The president exploded when he saw Wadsworth's handiwork.
The provisions in the new bill struck him as "so bad that . . . if they had been
deliberately designed to prevent remedying of the evils complained of, they
could not have been worse."
Two provisions particularly infuriated Roosevelt. The Agriculture
Department had suggested as a compromise that Congress authorize an
annual appropriation, but also grant the secretary standby power to levy a
head fee if the appropriation proved inadequate. Lorimer and Wadsworth
insisted on an annual sum of $1 million, scarcely enough to meet current
costs. And once again, they had shifted final authority under the act from the
secretary of agriculture to the federal courts.
The president did not deny that the packers, like anyone else, were
entitled to "due process." But he also believed that court review should
be restricted to a narrow procedural question: had the secretary been fair
in reaching his decision? The committee granted the courts power to
rule on substantive questions of fact. "You would have the functions of
the Secretary of Agriculture narrowly limited so as to be purely ministe­
rial," Roosevelt told Wadsworth, "and when he declared a given slaugh­
ter house unsanitary, or a given product unwholesome, acting upon the
judgment of government experts, you would put on a judge, who had no
knowledge of conditions, the burden of stating whether the Secretary
was right."
Wadsworth refused to be cowed by the president's angry outburst. "You
are wrong, very, very wrong in your estimate of the committee's bill," he
responded. He even criticized the president for "impugning the sincerity and
competency of a Committee of the House of Representatives" and called his
substitute measure "as perfect a piece of legislation to carry into effect your
own views on this question as was ever prepared by a committee of Con­
gress." Lorimer, too, vowed to continue his defiance of the president.
250 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

All that sniping would not deserve a historian's attention except for one
important detail-all the antagonists belonged to the same party. The meat­
inspection battle had pitted a popular and powerful Republican president
and his Senate friends against the Republican majority in the House. Sena­
tor Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, perhaps the president's closest
political ally, had made the intraparty schism that much more public when
he denounced the "greedy" packers for their attempt to derail the reform
bill. Sensing the growing embarrassment among Republicans, House Dem­
ocrats sought to deepen the rift. They insisted that the Beveridge bill be
given a full vote on the House floor, even though it had not been voted
out of the Agriculture Committee. "Czar" Joseph Cannon, the dictatorial
Republican speaker, temporarily retrieved the situation for his party by rul­
ing the motion out of order.
Cannon was now the man on the hot seat. The catfight among Repub­
licans threatened to weaken party unity and with it the political empire
he ruled so ruthlessly. His personal and political sympathies lay with the
packers and conservatives who opposed government regulation of the free
enterprise system. His power came, however, not from leading any particu­
lar faction, but from bringing together all the elements of his party. With
his power base wobbling, Cannon sought some way to break the impasse
between Republican reformers and conservatives. Since Roosevelt, too, had
an interest in party unity, the speaker went to see him at the White House.
The president proved amenable to a suitable compromise. They agreed that
Wisconsin Representative Henry Adams, a moderate and a member of the
Agriculture Committee, was the best person to work out the details. Adams
had endorsed earlier compromises and, as a former food commissioner and
champion of pure-foods legislation, he was free of the taint that clung to
Wadsworth and Lorimer. Adams, Reynolds, and Agriculture Department
lawyers had soon produced a new bill. From the Wadsworth-Lorimer mea­
sure they dropped the civil service waiver, added a provision for dating
canned meats, gave the secretary standby fee authority, and eliminated the
section on broad court review. Roosevelt declared their measure "as good as
the Beveridge amendment."
While Cannon and Roosevelt negotiated, Wadsworth and Lorimer were
away from Washington. When they returned, they vowed to reverse the
president's apparent victory. Cannon, however, had no appetite for further
infighting. He urged the Agriculture Committee to work out yet another
compromise. Wadsworth and Lorimer immediately deleted the secretary's
standby fee authority from the Adams bill, though they did raise the appropri­
ation to $3 million, more than enough to meet current costs. Their axe next
fell on the dating requirement, and, in return, they kept out the civil service
waiver, while explicitly authorizing inspectors to visit plants "day or night."
One crucial issue remained. What would be the scope of court review?
Wadsworth was willing to drop his
demand for broad review if the presi­ What would be the scope of
dent took out the Senate's phrase giving court review?
 USDA Government Inspected 2 51

the secretary "final and conclusive" authority. Roosevelt agreed to that horse
trade, which one historian aptly described as "purposeful obscurity." In other
words, the bill obscured whether final authority would rest with the secretary
or with the courts. To achieve improved inspection, Roosevelt was willing
to have the courts decide the actual scope of judicial review. He regretted
the absence of mandatory dating but did not consider the issue sufficiently
important to upset the hard-won compromise. Roosevelt often criticized
those diehards who would go down fighting for a "whole loaf " when "half
a loaf " was the best they could expect. With the president behind the final
committee bill, the entire House passed it onJune 19.
The battle was not yet won, however, for Beveridge and the reformers in
the Senate continued their fight, threatening to keep the two Houses dead­
locked until recess. The Indiana senator had strong support from Redfield
Proctor, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Although nearly
crippled by rheumatism, Proctor had stayed on in Washington to ensure
passage of an effective meat bill. Like Beveridge, he believed a consumer had
the right to know whether canned meats were five days or five years old. And
if the government stamp would be worth millions in free advertising for the
packers, Proctor thought the industry, not the taxpayer, should bear the cost.
The Senate, therefore, voted to reject the House bill in favor of its own.
Once again, process more than substance determined the outcome. When
the two Houses pass different versions of the same bill, they create a confer­
ence committee to iron out the discrepancies. With time too short for long
wrangling over each point, Roosevelt intervened. He first urged the House
members to reconsider their position on dating and fees. They refused so
vehemently that Roosevelt turned to the Senate conferees instead. Proctor
and Beveridge recognized that further resistance meant total defeat. OnJune
29, the day before adjournment, they raised the white flag "to make sure of
the greater good," and the Senate passed the House bill. The next day, after
Roosevelt signed the bill, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 became the law
of the land.

OuT OF THE JUNG LE

Was it time to uncork the champagne for a celebration? Despite their opposi­
tion to certain compromises, Roosevelt and Beveridge had endorsed the final
measure as a triumph for reform. If historians let the case rest here, however,
they would not know whether to accept Roosevelt and Beveridge's enthusi­
asm or Knute Nelson's despair. Who, after all, had won this legislative battle?
Certainly, reformers were heartened to see that the old toothless law had been
replaced by a system that required "day and night" inspection, banned unin­
spected meats from interstate commerce, gave the secretary authority to estab­
lish sanitary standards, and provided ample funding for the immediate future
at least. Yet the final bill contained no provisions for head fees or dating and
still left the courts as the final judge of the secretary of agriculture's rulings.
252 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Roosevelt, Beveridge, and Nelson had reacted to the provisions in the bill
as Congress passed it. The real impact of any new law, however, remains
uncertain until it is applied by the executive branch and tested in the courts.In
the case of the Meat Inspection Act, future presidents might appoint agricul­
ture secretaries sympathetic to the packers.The standards established might
be either too vague or too lax to enforce proper sanitation.More important,
the courts might yet call Roosevelt's bluff and assume their prerogative for
broad review. Historians must learn how the new system worked over time
before they can decide whether the compromises vindicated Roosevelt or
proved "half a loaf " worse than none at all.
As it happens, the subsequent history of meat inspection confirms the wis­
dom of the president's compromise strategy. The $3-million appropriation
more than adequately funded the "beefed-up " inspection system. By the end
of 1907 Secretary Wilson reported that new and more efficient procedures
had substantially reduced operating costs.The BAI spent only $2 million the
first year, and costs dropped even though the industry grew.
Roosevelt had been shrewdest in his resort to "purposeful obscurity."
The packers made no attempt to dismantle the inspection system in the
courts-the first important case did not arise for more than ten years. Then
in 1917, in United States v. Cudahy Packing Co., et al., a federal judge affirmed
the secretary's authority. Congress, he ruled, could "delegate authority to
the proper administrative officer to
make effective rules." Two years later
Roosevelt had been shrewdest in his
the Supreme Court adopted nar-
row rather than broad review. In an
resort to ''purposeful obscurity."
opinion for a unanimous Court in the
case of Houston v. St. Louis Independent Packing Company, Justice John Clarke
wrote that a decision over proper labeling of meat "is a question of fact, the
determination of which is committed to the Secretary of Agriculture ..., and
the law is that the conclusion of the head of an executive department ... will
not be reviewed by the Courts, where it is fairly arrived at with substantial sup­
port." After thirteen years, the reformers could finally claim victory, though
the outcome by then was scarcely in doubt. Not until 1968 did another gen­
eration of reformers, spurred by Ralph Nader, find it necessary to launch a
new campaign to strengthen the inspection system. And in the twenty-first
century, the health of the nation's meat remains a widespread concern.
The controversy over meat inspection reminds the historian that when a
legislative issue involves the disposition of economic and political power, all
three branches of government influence the outcome. This input does not
mean, however, that their roles are equal. In this case a politically shrewd
and popular executive had shown greater capacity to affect the political pro­
cess at critical moments. Roosevelt used the power of his office, his control
over the Republican Party, and his ability to generate publicity to overcome
opposition on both sides. Beveridge admitted that even in the face of wide­
spread public outrage, Congress would not have acted "if the President had
not picked up his big stick and smashed the packers and their agents in the
 USDA Government Inspected 253

House and Senate over the head with it." Yet Roosevelt prevailed in the end
only because he recognized compromise as an essential feature of the politi­
cal process. He had yielded on points he considered less consequential in
order to achieve his larger objective.
Just as historians must expand their field of vision to weigh the effects
on a law of all three branches of government, so too they must establish the
historical context of a bill over time. As we discovered, the meat scandal had
a long history before the publication of The Jungle. We discovered, too, the
existence of near-unanimous support for stricter inspection, though there
was little understanding of what form a new law might take. Only when the
bill made its way through the legislative process did we find that the wide­
spread cry for reform masked a deep conflict over the roles of private and
public agencies in determining satisfactory standards. The packers wanted
the benefits of a new bill without having to relinquish control over their
business. Reformers had both a moral goal and a political one. First, they
wanted to punish the packers for their disregard for the public good. Sec­
ond, and more consequentially, reformers sought to assert the authority
of the federal government to police "corporate arrogance." The success of
that effort remained in doubt until well after the bill's enactment, when the
Supreme Court adopted narrow review.
It becomes clear, then, why the Meat Inspection Act could generate both
Beveridge's enthusiasm and Nelson's dismay. The outcome had been a total
victory for neither reformers nor packers. As is so often the case, the political
system achieved results only after the visible symbols and myths of public
discourse had been negotiated, debated, and compromised in the procedural
tangle at the heart of the legislative process. Gone from our analysis are
those wonderful symbols of corporate villainy and presidential heroism. But
in their place we have a more complex story revealing the political processes
that shape our history.
2 54 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

This chapter grew out of an Early Concentration History seminar at Yale

University in which students had an opportunity to reconstruct history from
primary sources. Many of the students in that seminar showed remarkable
initiative in locating additional materials. In particular, they discovered the
section in John Braeman's "The Square Deal in Action: A Case Study in the
Growth of 'National Police Power' " that discusses the constitutional ques­
tions the new meat-inspection law raised. That essay appears in Braeman et
al., Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America, vol. 1 (Columbus, OH,
1964), pp. 34-80. Historians took much longer to discover certain urban
and ecological factors involved in this episode. William Cronon, Nature's
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), places the industry
in its urban context and establishes its links to a rural hinterland. Cronon,
while no fan of big-business practices, recognizes the revolutionary nature of
what the Chicago packers accomplished with such innovations as the mov­
ing (dis)assembly line and the refrigerated railcar. Like Cronon, Michael
McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement
in America, 1870-1920 (New York, 2003), and Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of
Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago,
1999), offer a more modulated view of business and reform. The older muck­
rakers' bias is reflected in two books by Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New
York, 1906) and his often autobiographical The Brass Check (Pasadena, CA,
1919). On Theodore Roosevelt and traditional debate over Progressivism,
see George Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 19 5 8); Gabriel
Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York, 1964); and Lewis Gould,
ed., The Progressive Era (1973). Another helpful secondary work is Joel Tarr,
Boss Politics (Chicago, 1964), which examines the career of "Blond Billy"
Lorimer. David Thelen's "Not Classes, But Issues," which first appeared
in the Journal of American History 1 (September 1969): 323-334, offers a
stimulating review of the many explanations of Progressivism, as well as a
substantial interpretation of his own. That historiography was updated by
Dan Rogers, "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History 10
(1982). Robert Crunden, Ministers ofReform: The Progressives' Achievements in
Modern America, 1889-1920 (Urbana, IL, 1982), gives additional insight into
the reform impulse that swept the nation. A reconsideration of Sinclair and
other reformers comes in Walter Brasch, Forerunners ofRevolution: Muckrak­
ers and the Social Conscience (New York, 1990).
The documents in this case study are available in good research librar­
ies and can be assembled. Such newspapers as the New York Times, Chicago
Tribune, Chicago Record-Herald, and Chicago Inter-Ocean covered the entire
controversy, though the Chicago papers did so in greater depth. Much of
Roosevelt's thinking can be found in Elting Morison et al., The Letters of
Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA, 1953). Access to some contem­
porary magazines, including Everybody's Magazine, The Lancet, Cosmopolitan,
 USDA Government Inspected 255

and specifically J. Ogden Armour, "The Packers and the People," Satur­
day Evening Post 177, 3 7 (March 10, 1900)-a key document in Kolko's
interpretation-will provide a picture of the debate over meatpacking and
other muckraking issues.
This chapter drew most heavily on government documents. Readers
should see Congressional Record, 59th Congress, 1st Session; House Commit­
tee on Agriculture, 59th Congress, 1st Session, Hearings ... on the So-called
"Beveridge Amendment" to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill-H.R. 185 37
(Washington, DC, 1906); Bureau of Animal Industry, Twent:y-Third Annual
Report (Washington, DC, 1906); House Document 873, 59th Congress, 1st
Session Oune 1906)-the Neill-Reynolds report and Theodore Roosevelt's
cover letter; and the Agriculture Committee's minority and majority reports
in House Report 4935, pts. 1 and 2, 59th Congress, 1st Session (June 14 and
15, 1906), and House Report 3468, pt. 2, 59th Congress, 1st Session (June 15,
1906). Additional materials can be found in the Roosevelt Papers (Harvard
University, Widner Library) and Beveridge Papers (University of Indiana).
CHAPTER I I

Sacco and Vanzetti

The Commonwealth ofMassachusetts "demands no victims,"

insisted the court-or did it when it executed Sacco and Vanzetti?

In the years after World War I, armed robberies occurred at an alarming

rate. In such anxious times, anyone handling large sums of money had rea­
son to be cautious. In December 1919 a gang of bandits had attempted an
unusually brazen daylight payroll heist in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. After
a brief gunfight the bandits had fled empty-handed, and no one was hurt.
Still, Frederick Parmenter, paymaster for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Com­
pany of nearby South Braintree, normally used a car to deliver his payroll
boxes to the lower factory building. On the afternoon of April 15, 1920,
however, the car was not ready. His boss, Rexford Slater, encouraged him
to walk the short distance from the office to the factory. So he and his assis­
tant, Alessandro Berardelli, set off together with two steel boxes containing
$15,776.51.
Halfway to their destination, a man approached Berardelli from the side
of the road, spoke to him briefly, and then suddenly shot him. As Parmenter
turned to flee, another bandit fired, mortally wounding him. Berardelli
struggled to his knees. The gunman then fired several more shots, leaving
him dead in the street. A blue Buick pulled from its parking place. The two
assailants and their lookout jumped into the car and fled toward Bridgewa­
ter. The robbery had lasted little more than a minute. To discourage pur­
suers, the bandits threw tacks onto the streets. When the Buick reached a
railroad crossing, the guard raised the gate. "Put them up or we'll put a hole
through you," the bandits warned. The guard put up his hands, but they shot
at him anyway. Narrowly missing, they sped on. Two miles from Braintree
they abandoned the Buick and escaped in another car.
Bridgewater Police Chief Michael Stewart thought he recognized a pat­
tern in the Braintree crime. The same foreigners who bungled the Decem­
ber heist, he guessed, had probably pulled off the Braintree job. Stewart's
investigation put him on the trail of Mike Boda, an Italian anarchist. Unable
to locate Boda, Stewart kept watch on a car Boda had left at Simon Johnson's
garage for repairs. Whoever came to get the car would, according to Stew­
art's theory, become a prime suspect in both crimes.

256
 Sacc1J and Vanzetti 2 57

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, accused of committing a payroll robbery

of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. When
police asked witnesses to identify the two men, instead of using a lineup, officers
made Sacco and Vanzetti stand alone in the middle of a room and pose as hand.its.

His expectations were soon rewarded. On May 5, 1920, Boda and three
other Italians called for the car Mrs.Johnson immediately slipped next door
.

to alert the police, but the four men did not wait for her return. Boda and
one friend, Riccardo Orciani, left on a motorcycle, while their companions
walked to a nearby streetcar stop. Apparently nervous, they moved on to
another stop a half mile away. There they boarded the trolley for Brock­
ton. As the trolley car moved down Main Street, Police Officer .Michael
Connolly climbed on. Having spotted the two foreigners, he arrested them.
When they asked why, he replied curtly, "suspicious characters."
Thus began the epic story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two
obscure Italian aliens who became the focal point of one of the most con­
troversial episodes in American history. Within little more than a year after
their arrest, a jury deliberated for just five hours before convicting both men
of robbery and murder. Such a quick decision came as a surprise, particularly
in a trial that had lasted seven weeks, heard more than 160 witnesses, and
gained national attention.
Nor did the controversy end with the jury's decision. Six years of
appeals turned a small-town incident of robbery and murder into a major
258 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

international uproar. The Italian government indicated that it was follow­

ing the case with interest. Thousands of liberals, criminal lawyers, legal
scholars, civil libertarians, radicals, labor leaders, prominent socialites,
and spokespersons for immigrant groups rallied to Sacco and Vanzetti's
cause. Arrayed against them was an equally imposing collection of the
nation's legal, social, academic, and political elite.
The case climaxed on April 9, 192 7. Having denied some eight appeals,
trial judge Webster Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to die in the electric
chair. His action triggered months of protests and political activities. Around
Charleston Prison (where the two men were held) and the State House in
Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters marched, collected petitions, and
walked picket lines. Occasionally vio­
lence erupted between protesters and In New York� Union Square,
authorities, as mounted police attacked
15, 000 people gathered to stand
crowds in Boston and clubbed them off
the streets in New York. On August 22, in silent vigil. Similar crowds
the morning before Sacco and Vanzetti appeared in European cities.
were scheduled to die, Charleston Prison
appeared like an embattled fortress. Ropes circled the prison grounds to
keep protesters at bay as 800 armed guards walked the walls. In New York's
Union Square, 15,000 people gathered to stand in silent vigil. Similar crowds
congregated in major European cities. All awaited the news of the fate of "a
good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler."
The historian confronting that extraordinary event faces some perplexing
questions. How did a case of robbery and murder become an international
cause celebre? How was it that two Italian immigrants living on the fringe of
American society had become the focus of a debate that brought the nation's
cherished legal institutions under attack? Or as one eminent law professor
rhetorically posed the question:

Why all this fuss over a couple of "wops," who after years in this country had
not even made application to become citizens; who had not learned to use
our language even modestly well; who did not believe in our form of govern­
ment; ... who were confessed slackers and claimed to be pacifists but went
armed with deadly weapons for the professed purpose of defending their
individual personal property in violation of all the principles they preached?

THE QUESTION OF LEGAL EVIDENCE

Lawyers reviewing events might answer those questions by arguing that the
Sacco and Vanzetti case raised serious doubts about the tradition of Anglo­
Saxon justice so venerated in the United States. More specifically, many
legal scholars then and since have asserted that the trial and appeals process
failed to meet minimum standards of fairness, particularly for a criminal case
in which the defendants' lives hung in the balance.
 Sacco and Vanzetti 259

In the first flush of Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest, prosecutors seemed to have
good reason to label the two men "suspicious characters." Both Sacco and
Vanzetti were carrying loaded revolvers. Not only that, Sacco had twenty­
three extra cartridges in his pockets, while Vanzetti carried several shotgun
shells. When questioned, both men lied about their activities. They claimed
not to know Mike Boda or to have been at the garage to pick up Boda's car.
But suspicious behavior was one matter; proof that Sacco and Vanzetti had
committed the Braintree murders was another. AB the police and prosecutors
went about making their case, they followed distinctly irregular procedures.
To be sure, in 1920 the police were allowed to conduct an investigation
with far greater latitude than the law permits today. The Supreme Court
decisions in Miranda (1966) and Escobedo (1964) established that criminal
suspects have the right to remain silent, to be informed of their rights, and
to stand in an impartial lineup for identification. None of those guaran­
tees existed in 1920. Even so, District Attorney Frederick Katzmann and
Chief Stewart showed unusual zeal in constructing a case against Sacco and
Vanzetti. At no time during the first two days of questioning did they tell
either suspect why they had been arrested. Chief Stewart repeatedly asked
them not about the robbery, but about their political beliefs and associates.
The district attorney did obliquely inquire about their activities on April
15, though he never mentioned the Braintree crimes. Furthermore, when
the police asked witnesses to identify the suspects, they did not use a lineup.
Instead, they forced Sacco and Vanzetti to stand alone in the middle of a
room posing as bandits.
AB the investigation continued, the case came close to collapsing for lack of
evidence. Of the five suspected gang members, all but Vanzetti could prove
they had not been in Bridgewater during the December holdup attempt.
Despite an intensive search of the suspects' belongings, including a trunk
sent to Italy, Katzmann was never able to trace the money, even among radi­
cal political groups with whom the suspects were associated. Fingerprint
experts found no matches between prints lifted from the abandoned Buick
and those taken from the suspects.
Faced with those gaps in the evidence, Katzmann still decided, first, to
prosecute Vanzetti for the December Bridgewater holdup and, second, to
charge both Sacco and Vanzetti with the Braintree murders in April. Histo­
rians cannot be sure just why he chose to do so, but from the patterns of his
life they can make a convincing circumstantial argument. District attorneys
and prosecutors tend to be politically ambitious people and Katzmann was
no exception. He had made his way from working-class Boston to the elite
atmosphere of Harvard College. After a brief career in business, he gradu­
ated from Boston University's night law school. Working for an upscale Bos­
ton firm gave him a taste for fine living and a desire to advance his career.
By 1910 he inherited the job as district attorney for Norfolk County, south
of Boston. Observers recognized him as "a man on the make" and many
admired his tenacious style in the courtroom. A high-profile case such as the
260 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Braintree robbery and murders offered an opportunity no ambitious district

attorney could waste, nor afford to lose.Besides,he had an even more com­
pelling motive.He knew in his heart that Sacco was guilty and was confident
that Vanzetti was as well. These two anarchists threatened the society that
had opened its doors to people like him.
Arguing the Bridgewater case in June 192 0 before Judge Webster Thayer,
Katzmann presented a weak case against Vanzetti on the charge of assault
with intent to rob.Still,he did manage
to make the jury aware of Vanzetti's Katzmann saw anarchists as a
anarchist views and persuade them to threat to an America that offered
convict.Judge Thayer then meted out opportuni"ty to people like him.
an unusually severe sentence (twelve
to fifteen years) to a defendant with no criminal record for a crime in which
no one was hurt and nothing was stolen.
That conviction allowed Katzmann to proceed with the second trial, to
be held in the suburban town of Dedham. Since this trial would be a spe­
cial session of the superior court, a judge had to be appointed to hear the
case.Judge Thayer asked his old college friend, Chief Justice John Aiken,
for the assignment,even though he had presided over Vanzetti's earlier trial
and could scarcely consider himself impartial.Thus the second trial opened
with a judge who already believed unequivocally in the defendants' guilt.
Thayer's presence on the bench proved critical to the outcome of the case.
Unlike Katzmann,Thayer came from the right side of the tracks.His middle­
class parents sent him to private school and Dartmouth College. In 1917 a
Dartmouth classmate appointed him to the bench, where he specialized in
divorce cases.If Thayer had a defining characteristic,it was his sense of duty
and loyalty to country.He once remarked of the anarchists who threatened
his beloved country with violence, "Oh, how unfortunate that any such a
doctrine,so destructive in its character and so revolutionary in all its tenden­
cies[,] should ever have reached the sacred shores of these United States."
Sacco and Vanzetti were not the first anarchists he faced in his court.When
the bailiff opened the trial saying, "Oyez, oyez ... God save the Common­
wealth of Massachusetts," that is what Webster Thayer intended to do.
At Dedham,District Attorney Katzmann built his case around three major
categories of evidence: (1) eyewitness identification of Sacco and Vanzetti
at the scene, (2) expert ballistics testimony establishing Sacco's gun as the
weapon that fired the fatal shot at Berardelli and Vanzetti's gun as the one
taken from Berardelli during the robbery, and (3) the defendants' evasive
behavior both before and after arrest as evidence of what is legally termed
"consciousness of guilt."
The prosecution, however, had a difficult time making its case. Of the
"eyewitnesses " claiming to place Sacco and Vanzetti at the scene,one,Mary
Splaine, claimed to have observed the shooting from a window in the Slater
and Morrill factory for no longer than three seconds at a distance of about
60 feet. In that time she watched an unknown man in a car traveling
about 18 miles an hour.Immediately after the crime Splaine had difficulty
 Sacco and Vanzetti 2 61

describing any of the bandits,but one year later she picked out Sacco,vividly
recalling such details as his "good-sized " left hand. She refused to recant
her testimony even after the defense demonstrated that Sacco had relatively
small hands.
Louis Pelzer testified for the prosecution that upon hearing shots,he had
observed the crime from a window for at least a minute.He pointed to Sacco
as the "dead image " of the man who shot Berardelli.Two defense witnesses,
however,controverted Pelzer's story.Upon hearing the shots,they recalled,
the intrepid Pelzer had immediately hidden under his workbench-hardly a
vantage point from which to make a clear identification.
Lola Andrews, a third witness,claimed that on the morning of the crime
she had stopped near the factory to ask directions from a dark-haired man
working under a car. She later identified Sacco as that man. But a compan­
ion,Julia Campbell,denied that Andrews had ever spoken to the man under
the car. Instead, Campbell testified,Andrews had approached a pale, sickly
young man who was standing nearby.Other witnesses had recalled the same
pale person.A second friend swore that he had heard Andrews say after she
returned from police headquarters that "the government took me down and
wanted me to recognize those men and I don't know a thing about them."
Nor did Andrews's reputation as a streetwalker enhance her credibility.Yet
in his summation,prosecutor Katzmann told the jury that in eleven years as
district attorney he had not "ever before ...laid eye or given ear to so con­
vincing a witness as Lola Andrews."
Against Katzmann's dubious cast, the defense produced seventeen wit­
nesses who provided the defendants with alibis for the day or who had seen
the crime but had not seen Sacco or Vanzetti. One,an official of the Italian
Consulate in Boston, confirmed Sacco's claim that he had been in Boston
on April 15 acquiring a passport. The official remembered Sacco because
he had tried to use a picture over 10 inches square for his passport photo.
"Since such a large photograph had never been presented before," the offi­
cial recalled, "I took it in and showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate.
We laughed and talked over the incident.I remember observing the date ...
on a large pad calendar." Others said they had met Sacco at a luncheon ban­
quet that day.Witnesses for Vanzetti claimed to have bought fish from him.
Katzmann sought to persuade the jury that the witnesses had little reason to
connect such a mundane event with a specific date.
In the face of contradictory eyewitness testimony, the ballistics evidence
might have decided the case.To prove
murder,Katzmann wished to show that In the face of contradictory
the fatal shot striking Berardelli had
eyewitness testimony, the
come from Sacco's gun. Ballistics spe­
cialists can often identify the gun that
ballistics evidence might have
fired a bullet by characteristic marks,as decided the case.
distinct as fingerprints, that the barrel
and hammer make on the projectile and casing.Two experts, Captains Wil­
liam Proctor and Charles Van Amburgh,connected the fatal bullet to a Colt
262 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

pistol similar to and possibly the same as Sacco's.But neither ofKatzmann's

witnesses made a definitive link."It is consistent with being fired by that pis­
tol," Proctor replied toKatzmann.Van Amburgh also indicated some ambi­
guity: "I am inclined to believe that it was fired ...from this pistol."
For unknown reasons, defense attorneys never pursued the equivoca­
tion of those testimonies.Instead,they called their own ballistics specialists
who stated with absolute certainty that the fatal bullet could not have come
from Sacco's gun.In addition,they controverted the prosecutor's claim that
Vanzetti had taken Berardelli's gun during the holdup. Shortly before his
murder, Berardelli had left his pistol at a repair shop to have the hammer
fixed. Shop records, though imprecise, indicated that the gun was .32 cali­
ber, not a .38 such as Vanzetti was carrying. The records also supported
Mrs. Berardellis's sworn testimony that her husband had never reclaimed
his pistol.The defense then argued that the hammer on Vanzetti's gun had
never been repaired.
Since the defense had weakened the ballistics evidence,Katzmann based
his case primarily on "consciousness of guilt." To convict on those grounds,
he had to convince the jury that Sacco and Vanzetti had behaved like men
guilty of the crime, both before and after arrest.Here,Katzmann made his
case with telling effect. Why had the
defendants been carrying guns when
Why had the defendants been
they were arrested? They had gone
hunting that morning, they claimed. carrying guns when they were
But if that were the case, why were arrested?
they still carrying hunting weapons and
extra ammunition at night, when they set out to pick up Mike Boda's car?
They were in such a hurry, Sacco and Vanzetti replied, that they forgot to
leave their revolvers at home. ButKatzmann continued his onslaught.Why
did the two men lie at first about knowing Mike Boda or having visited the
garage? Surely this evasion indicated a clear consciousness of guilt.
To explain their clients' lies,defense lawyers were forced to introduce the
inflammatory issue of Sacco and Vanzetti's political beliefs.For indeed,both
men proudly proclaimed themselves to be anarchists,rejecting the authority
of any government. Capitalism, they believed,was little more than an orga­
nized system of banditry under which the rich and powerful extorted the
poor.Sacco and Vanzetti had both been active in the strikes and labor unrest
of the era.As a result,they had been alarmed by the government crackdown
on radicals that began in 1919. When Officer Connolly arrested them, the
two men assumed that they,too,had been snared in the government's drag­
net. They acted evasively, defense lawyers argued, not because they were
criminals but because radicals were being persecuted and deported. Once
arrested,Sacco and Vanzetti's fears were only confirmed by the police's con­
stant questions about their political beliefs.
Similar worries accounted for their peculiar actions at Johnson's garage,
the defense argued. Shortly before his arrest, Vanzetti had conferred with
the Italian Defense Committee of New York,then inquiring into the fate of
 Sacco and Vanzetti 2 63

a fellow anarchist, Andrea Salsedo. The committee knew only that Salsedo
was being held by Justice Department agents; members warned Vanzetti
that he and his friends might be in danger of being jailed or deported.Only a
week later, newspapers across the nation reported that Salsedo had fallen to
his death from a twelfth-floor window.The police insisted the case had been
a suicide, but many anarchists thought Salsedo had been pushed. Before he
died, had he provided the government with the names of other anarchists?If
so, Vanzetti and Sacco were at risk. Anyone found with anarchist literature
could be arrested and deported. It was for that reason, Sacco and Vanzetti
told the court, that they had gone to retrieve Mike Boda's car: they needed
it to carry away the radical pamphlets stored in their homes, something they
hardly wished to admit to police questioning them about radical activities.
The revelations of the defendants' radical politics could hardly have
raised the jury's opinion of the two men.And their explanations did not stop
Katzmann from focusing on consciousness of guilt in his final summation.
Nor did Judge Thayer take into account their explanations in his charge to
the jury. In theory, a judge's charge guides the jury as it interprets conflict­
ing evidence: in separating the relevant from the irrelevant and in establish­
ing the grounds for an objective verdict. But Thayer made his sympathies
all too clear. In discussing the ballistics testimony, he wrongly assumed that
Katzmann's expert witnesses had unequivocally identified Sacco's gun as
having fired the fatal shot. And he spent no time weighing the defense's
argument that prosecution eyewitnesses had been unreliable. Only when he
discussed consciousness of guilt did the judge become expansive and specific.
He lingered over the evidence offered by the police and the garage owner
while ignoring Sacco and Vanzetti's explanations.
Lawyers and legal historians have raised other telling criticisms-excesses
in the trial procedures, prejudice on the part of both judge and prosecutor,
bungling by the defense lawyer. Inevitably, these criticisms have influenced
the way historians have approached the controversy.Most of them have cen­
tered on the issue of proof of guilt. Contrary to popular opinion, the courts
do not determine whether a person is guilty or innocent of a crime. They
decide merely whether the prosecutor has assembled sufficient evidence to
establish guilt. The judge may even suspect a defendant is guilty, but if the
evidence does not meet minimum standards of legal proof, the court must
set the accused free. As one court concluded, "the commonwealth demands
no victims ...and it is as much the duty of the district attorney to see that no
innocent man suffers, as it is to see that no guilty man escapes."
Thus lawyers tend to focus on narrow, yet admittedly important, ques­
tions.They are all the more crucial when human lives are at stake, as was the
case with Sacco and Vanzetti.Believing that the legal system maintains vital
safeguards of individual rights, lawyers in general seek to ensure that proper
legal procedures have been followed, that evidence is submitted according
to established rules, and, in accordance with those procedures, that guilt has
been adequately determined.A lawyer answering the question "Why all the
fuss over the Sacco and Vanzetti case?" would most likely reply, "Because
264 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the trial, by failing to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, perpetrated a

serious miscarriage of justice."

BEYOND GUILT OR INNOCENCE

So far in these essays we have considered enough historical methods to
understand that history affords far more latitude in weighing and collect­
ing evidence than does the legal system. The law attempts to limit the flow
of evidence in a trial to what can reasonably be construed as fact. A judge
will generally exclude hearsay testimony, speculation about states of mind or
motives, conjecture, and vague questions leading witnesses to conclusions.
But those are sources of information upon which historians can and do draw
in their research. Historians can afford to speculate more freely, because
their conclusions will not send innocent people to jail or let the guilty go
free. In one instance, for example, appeals judges refused to act on defense
claims thatJudge Thayer had allowed his prejudices against Sacco and Van­
zetti to influence his conduct of the trial. They ruled that remarks made
outside the courtroom, no matter how inappropriate, had no bearing on
what occurred inside. By contrast, the historian can accept the fact ofJudge
Thayer's prejudice, regardless of where he revealed it.
Given their broader canons of evidence, historians might be tempted to
do what the lawyers failed to do-establish whether Sacco and Vanzetti actu­
ally did commit the robbery and murders at Braintree. To succeed in such
an investigation would at least lay the controversy to its final rest. Yet that
approach does not take us beyond the lawyers' questions. We are still dealing
with only two men-Sacco and Vanzetti-and one central question-guilty
or innocent?
We must remember, however, that when historians confront such either­
or questions, their overriding obligation is to construct an interpretation
that gives full play to all aspects of the subject being investigated, not just the
question of guilt or innocence. They must look beyond Sacco and Vanzetti
to the actions of the people and society around them. What political currents
led the prosecutor to bring those two men to trial? How much were Judge
Thayer, District Attorney Katzmann,
and the men in the jury box represen­
tative of Massachusetts or of American
Historians' obligations go
society in general? Of just what crime beyond the question ofguilt or
did the jury actually convict the defen­ innocence.
dants? In answering those questions,
historians must lift their drama out of the Dedham courtroom and into a
larger theater of action. In short, we cannot answer our original question
"Why all the fuss?" merely by proving the defendants guilty or innocent.
Historians want to know why this case provoked such sharp controversy for
so many years.
Any historian who studies the climate of opinion in the early 1920s can­
not help suspecting that those who prosecuted Sacco and Vanzetti were far
 Saao and Vim.utti 265

Many "old stock,, Americans from northem Europe feared that the new
flood of immigrants from southeastern Europe would, by sheer force of numbers,
displace them from their dominant place in society. Even a Progressive like
George Creel, who had been sympathetic to immigrants during World War I,
turned hostile and referred to the newcomers as "so much slag in the melting pot."
Respected academics published research that purported to prove "the intellectual
superiority of our Nordic groups over the Alpine, Mediterranean, and negro
groups."

more concerned with who the defendants were and what they believed than
with what they might have done. Throughout the nation,s history, Ameri­
cans have periodically expressed hostility toward immigrants and foreign
political ideas that were perceived as a threat to the "American way of life."
Nativism, as such defensive nationalism has been called, has been a problem
at least since the initial waves of Irish immigrants came ashore in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Until then, the United States had been a
society dominated by white Protestants with a common English heritage.
The influx of the Catholic Irish and then political refugees from the 1848
German revolution diversified the nation ,s population. Native-born Ameri­
cans became alarmed that immigration threatened their cherished institu­
tions. Later waves of newcomers from Asia, the Mediterranean, and eastern
Europe deepened their fears.
The tides of nativism tend to rise and fall with the fortunes of the nation.
During periods of prosperity, Americans often welcome immigrants as
a vital source of new labor. In the 1860s, for example, many Californians
266 .AFnm THE FAcr: THE ART 011 HlsTORICAL DETECTION

The rabid patriotism of the war led to widespread abuses of civil liberties. Here,
angry servicemen on the Boston Commons destroy a Socialist Party flag seized
during a 1918 peace march. The same spirit of intolerance was also reflected in
the Red Scare, during which an Indiana jury deliberated only two minutes before
acquitting a defendant who had shot and killed a radical for yelling, "To hell with
the United States!"

cheered the arrival of Chinese coolies, without whom the transcontinen­

tal railroad could not have been so quickly completed. In the 1870s, as the
nation struggled through a severe industrial depression, the same Califor­
nians who once welcomed the Chinese now clamored for laws to restrict the
number of Asian immigrants.
The period following World War I, which one historian labeled the "Tribal
Twenties,'' marked the high tide of nativism. Several factors accounted for
its resurgence. World War I had temporarily interrupted the flow of immi­
grants who, since the 1880s, had increasingly included a preponderance of
Catholics and Jews from countries with strong radical traditions. In 1914
alone, more than 138,000 of a total of 1.2 million immigrants to the United
States were Jews. During the war, the number fell to just 3,672 newcomers
in 1918 (out of a total of 110,000), but then rose to 119,000 (out of 805,000)
in 1921, the last year of unrestricted immigration. A similar pattern occurred
among Italians. In the entire decade of the 1870s, fewer than 50,000 Italians
came to the United States. More than ever, nativists protested that these
 S11Cco and Vimutti 267

Seeking to screen out

those immigrants who . .
. ..

were "undesirable," ..

many nativists urged

. ;
Congress to adopt a
'
literacy test. Although
.

campaigns for such a law

had been mounted since
the 1890s, only in 1917
did a literacy requirement
pass Congress. The cartoon
shown here disparages
such exclusionist policies, '
l

UT[Rtfll6
but in the 1920s the
pressure for even tighter
restrictions mounted,
to be embodied (as one
.Minnesota representative
1r[$f
',.,- .

put it) in a "genuine . '

100 per cent American

immigration law."

undesirable foreigners threatened to destroy cherished institutions, weaken

the genetic pool, or in other ways undermine the American way of life.
The rocky transition to a peacetime economy further aggravated resentment
toward immigrants. Returning veterans expected jobs from a grateful nation;
instead, they found crowds of unemployed workers around factory gates. The
army had discharged millions of soldiers almost overnight. The government
dismissed hundreds of thousands of temporary wartime employees and can­
celed millions of dollars' worth of contracts with private businesses. As the
economy plunged downward, native-born Americans once again looked on
new immigrants as a threat to their livelihoods. Organized labor joined other
traditional nativist groups in demanding new restriction laws.
Most business leaders were in no mood to compromise on union demands
for higher wages, improved working conditions, and the recognition of col­
lective bargaining They resented the assistance the government had given
organized labor during the war. Now, they not only rejected even the mild­
est union demands but also sought to cripple the labor movement. Conserva­
tives launched a national campaign to brand all organized labor as Bolsheviks,
Reds, and anarchists. They called strikes "crimes against society," "conspira­
cies against the government," and "plots to establish communism." As the
268 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

market for manufactures declined, employers had little reason to avoid a

showdown. Strikes saved them the problem of laying off unneeded workers.
Radicals played a minor role in the postwar labor unrest. Most union
leaders were as archly conservative as the employers they confronted. Still,
the constant barrage of anti-Red propaganda turned public opinion against
the unions. And American radicals fed that hostility by adopting highly vis­
ible tactics. The success of a small band of Bolsheviks in capturing Russia's
tottering government in October 1917 had rekindled waning hopes and at
the same time startled most Ameri­
cans. Two years later, the Bolsheviks
"... spreading Bolshevism in
boldly organized the Third Communist
the United States." International to carry the revolution
to other countries. Communist-led
worker uprisings in Hungary and Germany increased conservative anxiety
that a similar revolutionary fever might infect American workers, especially
after a Comintern official bragged that the money spent in Germany "was as
nothing compared to the funds transmitted to New York for the purpose of
spreading Bolshevism in the United States."
Only a few shocks were needed to inflame the fears of Americans caught in
the midst of economic distress, labor unrest, and renewed immigration from
southern and eastern Europe. Those shocks were provided by a series of anar­
chist bombings inspired by Luigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant who had settled
in New England. Although authorities at the time did not know it, members
of Galleani's circle were the source of a series of thirty parcels mailed in April
1919 to eminent officials, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, members of Congress, and
mayors, as well as the industrial magnatesJohn D. Rockefeller andJ. P. Mor­
gan. Only one of the deadly packages detonated (blowing off the hands of the
unsuspecting servant who opened it), but inJune a series of even more lethal
explosions rocked seven cities. The most spectacular explosion demolished the
entire front wall of Attorney General Palmer's home. The device exploded
prematurely, blowing to bits the man who was crouching by the front steps.
Palmer's Washington neighbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, called the police.
The American public had already learned to associate such deeds with
anarchists: the Haymarket Square explosion of 1886 as well as the assas­
sination of President William McKinley in 1901 by radical Leon Czolgosz.
("The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind," pro­
claimed McKinley's successor, Teddy Roosevelt.) Following the bombings
of 1919, Attorney General Palmer reacted swiftly, launching a roundup of
as many radicals as he could find, branding each "a potential murderer or a
potential thief." That the majority were only philosophical anarchists who
had never undertaken any violent acts toward the government did not deter
Palmer. That the majority were foreign-born served only to raise his patri­
otic bile: "Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity,
cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and
misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal types."
 Sacco and Vanzetti 269

For more than a year, Palmer and his young, Red-hunting assistant}. Edgar
Hoover organized government raids on homes, offices, union halls, and alien
organizations. Seldom did the raiders pay even passing attention to civil lib­
erties or constitutional prohibitions against illegal search and seizure. One
particularly spectacular outing netted more than 4,000 alleged subversives
in some thirty-three cities. Most of those arrested, though innocent of any
crime, were detained illegally by state authorities either for trial or Labor
Department deportation hearings. Police jammed suspects in cramped
rooms with inadequate food and sanitation. They refused to honor the sus­
pects' rights to post bail or obtain a writ of habeas corpus.
The public quickly wearied of Palmer and the exaggerated stories of grand
revolutionary conspiracies. Not one incident had produced any evidence of
a serious plot. Palmer predicted that on May 1, 1920, radicals would launch
a massive attempt to overthrow the government. Alerted by the Justice
Department, local police and militia girded for the assault. But May Day
passed without incident. The heightened surveillance did, however, have
profound consequences for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Both
men were on a list of suspects the Justice Department had sent to District
Attorney Katzmann and Chief Stewart. Just four days after the May Day
scare, Officer Connolly arrested the two aliens.
Sacco and Vanzetti fit the stereotypes that nativists held of foreigners.
Sacco arrived in the United States in 1908 at the age of seventeen. Like so
many other Italians, he had fled the oppressive poverty of his homeland with
no intention of making a permanent home in America. Most of the young
men planned to stay only until they had saved enough money to return home
and improve their family fortunes. Although born into a modestly well-to­
do family, Sacco was no stranger to hard labor. Shortly after his arrival, he
found steady work in the shoe factories around Milford, Massachusetts.
Resourcefulness and industry marked Sacco as the kind of foreign worker
whose competition American labor feared. Although he lacked formal
schooling, Sacco understood that skilled labor commanded steadier work
and higher wages, so he paid $50 out of his earnings to learn the specialized
trade of edge trimming. His wages soon reached as high as $80 per week.
By 1917 he had a wife and child, his own home, and $1,500 in savings. His
employer at the "3 K" shoe factory described him as an excellent worker and
recalled that Sacco often found time, despite his long workdays, to put in a
few hours each morning and evening in his vegetable garden.
Vanzetti conformed more to the nativist stereotype of shiftless foreigners
who drifted from one job to the next. Born in 1888 in the northern Italian
village of Villafalletto, he had come in 1908 to America, where, like many
other immigrants, he found a limited range of jobs open to him. He took a job
as a dishwasher in hot, stinking kitchens. "We worked twelve hours one day
and fourteen the next, with five hours off every other Sunday," he recalled.
"Damp food hardly fit for a dog and five or six dollars a week was the pay."
Fearing an attack of consumption, Vanzetti migrated to the countryside in
search of open-air work. "I worked on farms, cut trees, made bricks, dug
270 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

ditches, and quarried rocks. I worked in a fruit, candy and ice cream store
and for a telephone company," he wrote his sister in Italy. By 1914 he had
wandered to Plymouth, where he took a job in a cordage factory.
If that sketch captured the essence of Sacco and Vanzetti's lives, they
would most likely never have come to the attention of Justice Department
agents. But because they were aliens and anarchists, they embodied the kind
of foreign menace American nativists most feared. Although not a student of
politics like Vanzetti, Sacco was a rebel.
He identified closely with the workers'
Sacco and Vanzetti embodied
struggle for better wages and the right
American nativists' dark fiears.
to organize. In 1912 he and vanzetti
had independently participated in a vio-
lent textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Three years later, plant own­
ers around Plymouth had blacklisted Vanzetti for his role in a local strike.
Sacco had walked off his job to express sympathy for the cordage workers.
Soon after a local labor leader organized a sympathy strike to support work­
ers in Minnesota, authorities arrested Sacco and convicted him of disturbing
the peace. All this time, he and his wife regularly joined street-theater pro­
ductions performed to raise money for labor and radical groups.
American entry into World War I created a crisis for both men. Their
anarchist beliefs led them to oppose any war that did not work to overthrow
capitalism. Sacco even refused the patriotic pressures to buy war bonds. He
quit his job rather than compromise his principles. Both began to dread the
law requiring them to register (though in fact, as aliens they were ineligible
for military service). They decided to join a group of pacifists who in May
191 7 fled to Mexico, where the two first became personal friends. The hard
life and absence from his family finally drove Sacco to return home under an
alias, though he did reclaim his name and former job after the war. Vanzetti
returned to Plymouth and soon outfitted himself as a fish peddler.
So in the eyes of many Americans, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty in at
least one important sense. As self-proclaimed enemies of the capitalist sys­
tem, they had opposed "the American way of life" that nativists cherished.
Their suspicious behavior, which Katzmann successfully portrayed as con­
sciousness of guilt, was all too real, for they knew that their radical beliefs
might subject them to arrest and deportation, the fate hundreds of other
friends and political associates had already faced.
Certainly, the trial record shows that nativism influenced the way judge
and jury viewed the defendants. Almost all the eyewitnesses who identified
Sacco and Vanzetti were native-born Americans. That they saw a resem­
blance between the Italian suspects and the foreign-looking criminals proved
only, as Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter remarked, that there was
much truth in the popular racist song "All Coons Look Alike to Me." On
the other hand, almost all the witnesses substantiating the defendants' alibis
were Italians who answered through an interpreter. The jury, also all native­
born Americans, would likely accept Katzmann's imputation that foreigners
stuck together to protect each other from the authorities.
 Sacco and Vanzetti 2 71

The choice of Fred Moore as chief defense counsel guaranteed that radi­
calism would become a central issue in the trial. In his earlier trial, Van­
zetti had been defended by a conservative criminal lawyer, George Vahey.
The guilty verdict persuaded Vanzetti that Vahey had not done all he could
have, especially when Vahey entered into a law partnership with Katzmann
shortly after the trial. For the Dedham trial, friends, local labor leaders, and
anarchists created a defense fund to see that no similar betrayal by counsel
occurred.From Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an Industrial Workers of the World
agitator and wife of anarchist publisher Carlo Tresca, the defense-fund com­
mittee learned of Moore, who had participated in the trials of numerous
radicals, including two Italian anarchists charged with murder during the
Lawrence strike.Only later did the committee learn that Moore had contrib­
uted little to the acquittal of the Lawrence defendants.Moore's participation
must have reinforced the impression that Sacco and Vanzetti were danger­
ous radicals. He spent the bulk of defense funds to orchestrate a propaganda
campaign dramatizing the plight of his clients and the persecution of radi­
cals. He gave far less attention to planning defense strategy, left largely in
the hands of two local cocounsels, Thomas and Jeremiah McAnarney.
Yet in the courtroom, Moore insisted on playing the major role. The
McAnarneys soon despaired of making a favorable impression on the jury.
An outsider from California, Moore wore his hair long and sometimes
shocked the court by parading around in his shirtsleeves and socks. Rumors
abounded about his unorthodox sex life. And at critical moments he some­
times disappeared for several days.Judge Thayer once became so outraged
at Moore that he told a friend, "I'll show them that no long-haired anar­
chist from California can run this court." Not until 1924 did Moore finally
withdraw in favor of William Thompson, a respected Massachusetts crimi­
nal lawyer.
Nativism, particularly antiradicalism, obviously prejudiced Judge Thayer
and District Attorney Katzmann.We have already seen how Thayer used his
charge to the jury to underscore Katzmann's construction of the evidence in
the trial. Outside the courtroom, Thayer consistently violated the canons of
judicial discretion by discussing his views of the case. George Crocker, who
sometimes lunched with Thayer, testified that on many occasions the judge
"conveyed to me by his words and manner that he was bound to convict
these men because they were 'reds."' Veteran court reporter Frank Silbey
had been forced to stop lunching at the Dedham Inn to avoid Thayer and
his indiscreet remarks. Silbey later recalled, "In my thirty-five years I never
saw anything like it. ... His whole attitude seemed to be that the jurors were
there to convict these men."
From the moment the trial opened, Thayer and Katzmann missed few
opportunities to strike a patriotic pose or to remind the jury that both defen­
dants were draft dodgers.Thayer told the prospective jurors at the outset, "I call
upon you to render this service ... with the same patriotism as was exhibited
by our soldier boys across the sea." Katzmann opened his cross-examination
of Vanzetti with a cutting statement dressed up as a question: "So you left
272 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Plymouth, Mr. Vanzetti, in May 1917 to dodge the draft did you?" Since Van­
zetti was charged with murder, not draft evasion, the question served to arouse
the jury's patriotic indignation.
Katzmann struck hardest in his questioning of Sacco, whose poor com­
mand of English often left him confused or under a misapprehension.
Judge Thayer never intervened to restrain the overzealous prosecutor, even
when it became clear that Sacco could neither follow a question nor express
his thoughts clearly. Playing again upon the residual patriotic war fervor,
Katzmann hammered away at the defendant's evident disloyalty:

KATZMANN: And in order to show your love for this United States of
America when she was about to call upon you to become a soldier you ran
away to Mexico. Did you r un away to Mexico to avoid being a soldier for
the country that you loved?
SAcco: Yes.
KATZMANN: And would it be your idea of showing love for your wife that
when she needed you, you ran away from her?
SAcco: I did not run away from her.

When the defense objected, Thayer ruled that this line of questioning would
help establish Sacco's character. But instead of showing Sacco's philosophi­
cal opposition to war, Katzmann made the defendant appear, as one critic
expressed it, "an ingrate and a slacker" who invited the jury's contempt.
With such skillful cross-examination, Katzmann twisted Sacco's professed
love of "a free country" into a preference for high wages, pleasant work, and
good food.
The prosecutor summed up his strategy in his final appeal to the jury:
"Men of Norfolk do your duty. Do it like men. Stand together you men
of Norfolk." There was the case in a
nutshell-native American solidarity "Men ofN01folk, do your dury.
against alien people and their values. Do it l'k
z e men ...
.
"
Whether he had proved Sacco and
Vanzetti guilty of murder mattered little, for he had revealed their disloy­
alty. In case the point was lost, Judge Thayer reiterated it in his charge:

Although you knew such service would be arduous, painful, and tiresome, yet
you, like the true soldier, responded to the call in the spirit of supreme Ameri­
can loyalty. There is no better word in the English language than "loyalty."

And just who were those "men of Norfolk" to whom the judge and pros­
ecutor appealed? Could they put aside inflammatory rhetoric and render a
just verdict? Not a single foreign name, much less an Italian one, appeared
on the juror's list. Because Fred Moore had rejected any "capitalists" dur­
ing jury selection, a few prospective jurors whom the McAnarneys knew to
be fair-minded were kept off the jury. Those jurors selected were drawn
from the tradespeople and other respectable Protestants of the town. None
would share the defendants' antipathy to capitalism; few would have had
 Sacco and Vanzetti 273

any compassion for the plight of Italian immigrants or union members.

Even worse, the jury foreman, Harry Ripley, was a former police chief who
outdid himself in persuading his fellow jurors to convict. He violated basic
rules of evidence in a capital case by bringing into the jury room cartridges
similar to those placed in evidence. A short time before, he had told his
friend William Daly that he would be on the jury in "the case of the two
'ginneys' charged with murder at South Braintree." When Daly suggested
that they might be innocent, Ripley replied, "Damn them, they ought to
hang anyway."
By using the concept of nativism to gain a broader perspective, the his­
torian has come to understand the answer to a question lawyers need not
even ask: what factors accounted for the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti
where convincing evidence was so clearly lacking? Nativism explains many
prejudices exhibited in the trial record. It also explains why those attitudes
were so widespread in 1920-1921. We must accept the truth of law profes­
sor Edmund M. Morgan's assertion that it was "almost impossible to secure
a verdict which runs counter to the settled convictions of the community."
Sacco and Vanzetti symbolized for a majority of Americans and the "men
of Norfolk" alien forces that threatened their way of life. To be fair, we
should admit that the jurors denied that the defendants' politics had influ­
enced their verdict. They saw the judge as fair and the prosecutor's case as
persuasive, especially on the point of consciousness of guilt. All the same,
none of those "men of Norfolk" had even passing familiarity with the lives
of Italian immigrants.
Yet, having answered one important question, the historian still faces
another. Granted, a jury convicted two alien radicals of robbery and murder
in 1921, but "why all the fuss?" as we asked earlier, in the years that fol­
lowed? After all, Sacco and Vanzetti were not sentenced until 192 7, long
after the virulent nativist mood had passed. The Immigration Acts of 1921
and 1924 had severely curbed the flow of newcomers from Italy and east­
ern Europe. The damage from unsuccessful strikes, management opposi­
tion, and government hostility had sent organized labor into a decline from
which it would not recover until the New Deal years. The historian must
still explain how a local case extended its impact beyond Norfolk County to
the nation and even the international community.
No single answer, even one so broad as nativism, can account for the
notoriety. Certainly, from the beginning the case had sent ripples across
the nation. Socially prominent individuals, intellectuals, the American
Federation of Labor, immigrant groups, and radicals had all contributed
to the defense fund for the Dedham trial. Those people represented a
small minority without great political influence. But by tracing out the
appeals process, the historian discovers a series of events that enlarged the
significance of the case, heightened the public's awareness of the crucial
issues involved, and raised the stakes many groups risked on the judicial
outcome.
27 4 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

A NATION STIRRED
In the American legal system, the right of appeal is designed to protect
defendants against any miscarriage of justice rising out of the original trial.
But in 1920 the appeals process in Massachusetts contained a provision that
ultimately proved fatal to Sacco and Vanzetti. Any motion for a retrial based
on new evidence had to be granted by the original trial judge. On each of
eight motions made by the defense, including substantial evidence of preju­
dice on the part of the judge, the person who heard that appeal was none
other than Webster Thayer! Thayer did not have to determine whether new
information proved the men innocent, only whether another jury might rea­
sonably reach a different verdict.
The next higher court, the Supreme Judicial Court, had only narrow
grounds on which to reverse Thayer's decisions. It could review the law in
each case but not the facts. Those grounds meant that the court could deter­
mine only if the procedure conformed to the criteria of a fair trial established
under state and federal constitutions. Although it found some irregularities
in procedure, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that those irregularities did
not prejudice the verdict against the defendants. At no time did that court
review the weight of evidence presented at the trial or on appeal. It deter­
mined, instead, that a reasonable judge might have acted as Thayer did.
And what of the American Supreme Court, the ultimate safeguard of civil
liberties? On three separate occasions the defense attempted to move the
case into the federal courts. Defense attorneys argued that Sacco and Van­
zetti had been the victims of a sham trial, particularly given Judge Thayer's
overwhelming prejudice. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., long a cham­
pion of civil liberties, wrote that the court could rule only on the grounds of
constitutional defects in Massachusetts law. Since none existed, he refused in
192 7 to grant a writ of certiorari allowing the Supreme Court to review the
weight of evidence. Thus the appeals procedure created a formidable barrier
to reversing the verdict rendered at Dedham.
In the face of such inequities, the defense spent six years fighting to over­
turn the conviction. Between July 1921 and October 1924 it presented five
motions for a new trial. The first involved the behavior of jury foreman
Harry Ripley. In response, Thayer completely ignored the affidavit from
Ripley's friend William Daly and ruled that Ripley's tampering with evi­
dence had not materially affected the verdict. Eighteen months later the
defense uncovered an important new witness, Roy Gould, who had been
nearly shot at point-blank range by the fleeing bandits. Gould had told his
story to police immediately afterward, but Katzmann never called him to
testify. Eventually defense lawyers uncovered Gould and realized why he
had been kept off the stand. Gould had been so close to the escape car that
one shot passed through his overcoat; yet he swore that Sacco was not one
of the men. Judge Thayer rejected that appeal on the grounds that since
Gould's testimony did no more than add to the cumulative weight of evi­
dence, it did not justify a new trial.
 Sacco and Vanzetti 2 75

Later appeals attempted to show that the prosecutor had tampered with
the testimony of two key witnesses. Both witnesses had recanted their court­
room statements and then later recanted their recantations. Rather than find
Katzmann guilty of impropriety, Thayer condemned Moore for his "bold
and cruel attempt to sandbag" witnesses. Yet another motion came after the
prosecution's ballistics expert, Captain Proctor, signed an affidavit in which
he swore that on many occasions he had told Katzmann that there was no
evidence proving Sacco's gun had fired the fatal shot. He warned that if the
prosecutor asked a direct question on that point, Proctor would answer no.
Katzmann had, therefore, carefully tailored his questions during the trial. By
the time Thayer heard this motion, Proctor had died. The judge ruled that
the jury had understood perfectly what Proctor meant and that Katzmann
had not been unfairly evasive.
After that setback, Fred Moore finally withdrew from the case in favor
of William Thompson, a distinguished trial lawyer who devoted the rest of
his career to Sacco and Vanzetti's cause. Thompson made the first appeal to
the Supreme Judicial Court. He argued that the accumulated weight of new
evidence and the repeated rejection of appeals demonstrated that Thayer
had abused his authority out of hostility to the defendants. Unlike histo­
rians, who would render judgment on the basis of the totality of evidence,
the appeals judges turned down the defense arguments case by case, point
by point. In each separate instance, they ruled that Judge Thayer had acted
within his proper authority.
Throughout this drawn-out process, public interest in the case had steadily
dwindled. But after November 18, 1925, controversy exploded once again.
Sacco received a note from a fellow inmate that read, "I hear by [sic] confess
to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti
was not in said crime. Celestino F. Medeiros." Medeiros was a young pris­
oner facing execution for a murder conviction.
The defense soon connected Medeiros to the Morelli gang of Provi­
dence, Rhode Island. In the spring of 1921, the Morellis badly needed
money to fight a pending indictment and so had ample reason to commit
a payroll robbery. Joe Morelli carried a .32 Colt pistol and bore a striking
resemblance to Sacco. Another gang member carried an automatic pistol,
which could have accounted for spent cartridges found at the scene. Mike
Morelli had been driving a new Buick, which disappeared after April 15.
Another member fit the description of the pale, sickly driver. A number of
defense and prosecution witnesses identified Joe Morelli when shown his
picture. The New Bedford police had even suspected the Morellis of the
Braintree crime.
Once again, the district attorney's office refused to reopen the case. The
defense then appealed to Thayer to order a new trial. In reviewing the evi­
dence, Thayer did not have to determine if it conclusively demonstrated
Medeiro's guilt or Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence. He had only to decide
that a new jury might now reach a different verdict. It took Thayer some
25,000 words to deny this motion.
2 76 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

That decision, more than any other, unleashed the torrent of outrage that
surrounded the last months of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Felix Frank­
furter, an eminent Harvard Law School professor and later Supreme Court
justice, published a lengthy article in the Atlantic Monthly in which he ques­
tioned the conduct of Thayer and Katzmann and the state appeals court's
refusal to grant either clemency or a new trial. "I assert with deep regret, but
without the slightest fear of disproof,"
he wrote, "that certainly in modern
". . . a farrago of misquotations,
times Judge Thayer's opinion [on the
Medeiros motion] stands unmatched
misrepresentations, suppressions,
for discrepancies between what the and mutilations. "
record discloses and what the opinion
conveys." Frankfurter described the document as "a farrago of misquota­
tions, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations." The Boston Her­
ald rebuked Thayer for adopting "the tone of the advocate rather than the
arbiter." Once a staunch supporter of the prosecution, the Herald now called
on the Supreme Judicial Court to overturn this ruling. Once again, the
court refused to weigh the evidence. It ruled in rejecting the appeal that the
defense motion involved questions of fact lying totally within the purview of
the trial judge.
That decision, in combination with Frankfurter's blistering attack, shifted
public sympathy to Sacco and Vanzetti. A mounting body of evidence seemed
to indicate that the two men were innocent. Yet, as the courts remained deaf
to the defense appeals, more and more reasonable people came to suspect
that, indeed, powerful men and institutions were conspiring to destroy two
people perceived as a threat to the social order. Thayer's sentence of death
by electrocution seemed but a final thread in a web of legal intrigue to com­
mit an injustice.
Sacco and Vanzetti played an important part in winning broad popular
support for their cause. Steadfastly, in the face of repeated disappointments,
they maintained their innocence. Sacco, the more simple and direct of the
two, suffered deeply as a result of separation from his family. During the
first trying years, he went on a hunger strike and suffered a nervous break­
down. From that point on, he stoically awaited the end, more preoccupied
with saving his wife further anguish than with saving himself. To assist the
defense effort, however, he had begun in 1923 to study English, though with
little success. A letter written to his teacher in 1926 conveys his energetic,
simple idealism. Sacco had wanted to explain to his teacher why he had been
unable to master the language:

No, it isn't, because I have try with all my passion for the success of this beau­
tiful language, not only for the sake of my family and the promise I have made
to you-but for my own individual satisfaction, to know and to be able to read
and write correct English. But woe is me! It wasn't so; no, because the sadness
of these close and cold walls, the idea to be away from my dear family, for all
the beauty and joy of liberty-had more than once exhaust my passion.
 SllCCO and Vanzetti 277

Many artists, intellectuals, and literary figures sympathized with Sacco and
Vanzetti. Maxwell Anderson wrote a play, Gods ofthe Lightning; Upton Sinclair, the
novel Boston; and Edna St. Vincent Millay, a series of sonnets. Artist Ben Shahn,
himself an immigrant from Lithuania, received recognition during the 1930s for his
series of twenty-three paintings on Sacco and Vanzetti. "\.Vhen the painting shown
here is compared with the photograph of the two men on page 257, Shahn's source
becomes evident. But the artist transformed the photograph in subtle ways. Given
our earlier discussion of photographic evidence, how do the changes lend more

force to his painting?

Vanzetti's articulate, often eloquent speeches and letters won him the
respect of fellow prisoners, defenders, and literary figures drawn to the case,
including Upton Sinclair, whose refonnist instincts had not deserted him
since writing The Jungk twenty years earlier. (Vanzetti was "one of the wis­
est and kindest persons I ever knew," Sinclair wrote, "and I thought him as
incapable of murder as I was.") When at last Vanzetti stood before Judge
Thayer on the day of his sentencing, he spoke passionately of the first prin­
ciples that moved him:

Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have
I never committed a real crime in my life-though some sins but not crimes­
not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes official
law and official moral condemns, but also the crime that the official moral and
official law sanctions and sanctifies,-the exploitation and the oppression of
man by man, and if there is reason why you in a few minutes can doom me,
278 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

it is this reason and nothing else ... I would not wish to a dog or to a snake,
to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth-I would not wish to
any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But
my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty of. I am suffering
because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was
an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and
beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could
execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live
again to do what I have done already.

The question of guilt or innocence, Vanzetti seemed to suggest, involved

more than courtroom evidence. Despite the safeguards of the rule of law,
society had used a broad constellation of attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices
embedded in American culture to judge Vanzetti guilty. And, a historian
might add, from out of Vanzetti's own constellation of beliefs, attitudes,
and prejudices, he continued to condemn all governments as oppressive,
all institutions as evil. This was the anarchist philosophy he lived by-the
"Idea," as he and fellow believers termed it.Vanzetti reaffirmed his right to
war against American society and against "the crime that the ...official law
sanctions and sanctifies."
As the debate and protests continued, public support for the execution
began to erode.Yet an equally vocal element of the populace hailed Thay­
er's conduct as a message to "Reds " that they could not subvert the Com­
monwealth of Massachusetts. Thus Governor Alvan Fuller faced a difficult
decision when he received a plea from Vanzetti for executive clemency.* To
ease the political pressure on him, Fuller appointed a blue-ribbon panel to
review the entire trial and appeals process. The three men he chose were
symbols of the commonwealth's social and educational elite. Retired Judge
Robert Grant was a New England patrician and novelist devoted to the
Anglo-American traditions of Massachusetts. Samuel Stratton, president
of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was clearly overshadowed by the
committee chair,A. Lawrence Lowell-a pillar of Boston society,a lawyer by
training,and the president of Harvard.Lowell had already demonstrated his
capacity for ethnocentrism,having introduced quotas to limit the number of
Jewish students admitted to Harvard. As the liberal New Republic remarked
of the committee, "the life of an Italian anarchist was as foreign to them as
life on Mars."
For more than ten days the three men heard testimony on the evidence,
much of it new. The defense also submitted a lengthy brief. But the com­
mittee's deliberations were short.On July 27 it filed its final report,uphold­
ing both the verdict and sentence against Sacco and Vanzetti. Sympathizers
reacted with a mixture of despair and disgust. "What more can immigrants
from Italy expect?" asked editorial writer Heywood Broun. "It's not every
prisoner who has the President of Harvard throw the switch for him."

* Sacco refused to sign. Although he agreed with Vanzetti's arguments, he did not want to violate his
anarchist principles by appealing to government authorities-or to give his wife further vain hopes.
 Sacco and Vanzetti 279

By the time all appeals were exhausted, the Sacco and Vanzetti case had
brought to public attention not only issues of guilt and innocence, but
more fundamental tensions in American society. On one side were arrayed
immigrants, workers, and the poor for whom Sacco and Vanzetti stood as
powerful symbols. On the other stood Thayer, the "men of Norfolk," the
Protestant establishment, and those who believed that America should toler­
ate only certain peoples and ideas.
On the night of August 22, 1927, John Dos Passos, a young writer, stood
with the crowd outside Charleston Prison waiting for news of Sacco and
Vanzetti's fate. Shortly after midnight word came-the "good shoemaker
and poor fish peddler" were dead. Grief and anger raked the crowd. Some
wept, others cried out in the name of justice, and many tore their clothes in
anguish. The scene outside the prison was repeated in New York and other
cities around the world. Years later, Dos Passos expressed the outrage he felt
against those who had persecuted Sacco and Vanzetti:

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire
and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with
reputations the collegepresidents the ward heelers (listen college presidents
judges America will not forget her betrayers)....
all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight
there is nothing left to do we are beaten....
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our lan­
guage inside out who have taken the clean words our Fathers spoke and made
them slimy and foul....
they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the
switch
all right we are two nations

Two nations-that was the reason for "all the fuss."

Will the real truth of the case ever be known? Perhaps not-at least not
"beyond a reasonable doubt," to borrow the language of the courts. Yet
historians have unearthed enough additional information to provide, if
not the certainties of fact, at least a few ironies of probability. After Sacco
and Vanzetti's execution, Upton Sinclair began to collect material for a
novel about the case. As a socialist who had staunchly defended the two
men during their years in prison, he was able to interview scores of friends
and associates. While Sinclair remained convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti
were innocent of the Bridgewater and Braintree robberies, he became less
sure whether the two men were merely philosophical anarchists. Both had
"believed in and taught violence," he discovered. "I became convinced from
many different sources that Vanzetti was not the pacifist he was reported to
be under the necessity of defense propaganda. He was, like many fanatics, a
dual personality, and when he was roused by the social conflict he was a very
dangerous man."
Historian Paul Avrich, investigating the anarchist community of which the
two men were a part, noted that Vanzetti was indeed a close friend of Luigi
2 80 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Galleani, the firebrand whose associates had launched the letter bombs of
1919 and dynamited Attorney General Palmer's home. "We mean to speak
for [the proletariat through] the voice of dynamite, through the mouth of
guns," announced the anarchist leaflet found nearby. Carlo Valdinoci, the
man who was blown up carrying out his mission, had been a good friend of
both Sacco and Vanzetti. Indeed, after Valdinoci's death, his sister Assunta
moved in with Sacco and his family. Then, too, rumors within the anarchist
community suggested that Vanzetti himself had assembled the bomb that
demolished a judge's home in Boston the night Valdinoci had done his work
in Washington.
"But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty of," Van­
zetti told Thayer at the end. Perhaps there was pride as well as indignation
in this response. What, in the end, was the guilt of which Sacco and Vanzetti
were so conscious during the trial? Was it the knowledge that their radi­
cal pamphlets, if found, would get them deported? But both men had been
preparing to flee the country anyway, before being arrested. (Recall Sacco's
outsized passport photo.) Could their evasive behavior have resulted from
the fact that they had more to conceal at home than a few pamphlets?
Upton Sinclair came to believe so. After the execution, Fred Moore con­
fided to him that Sacco and Vanzetti had admitted "they were hiding dyna­
mite on the night of their arrest, and
that that was the real reason why they
"IfI was arrested because of the
told lies and stuck to them." If true,
Sacco and Vanzetti, like Valdinoci, had
Idea I am glad to suffer. "
been willing to commit acts of anar­
chism that, by the laws of American society, would have been punishable
by death. Sacco made clear his own distinction between being tried for his
beliefs and being arrested for mere bank robbery. "If I was arrested because
of the Idea I am glad to suffer. If I must I will die for it. But they have
arrested me for a gunman job."
Is the final irony that Sacco and Vanzetti were willing to die-perhaps
even to kill others-for their Idea? Just as the "men of Norfolk" and the offi­
cials of Massachusetts were willing to execute Sacco and Vanzetti on behalf
of their idea of what America should be? ("Damn them, they ought to hang
anyway," remarked juror Ripley.) The historian must suspect that on that
August night in 1927, citizens were not merely fighting over a matter of guilt
or innocence, but (as Dos Passos put it) over the meaning of those "clean
words our Fathers spoke." Sacco and Vanzetti had forced the nation to ask
who in their own times best embodied the principles of freedom and equal­
ity inherited from 1776. Perhaps neither historians nor lawyers can resolve
that question to the satisfaction of a divided nation.
 Sacco and Vanzetti 281

Additional Reading

Periodically a new book comes along that reframes our understanding of the
case and the controversy surrounding it. Most recently, Bruce Watson, Sacco
and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment ofMankind (New York,
2007), offers what we consider the most lucid explanation so far. Among
those works that have sought to establish the guilt of Sacco, Vanzetti, or both,
the most forceful presentation is made by Francis Russell, Tragedy in Dedham
(New York, 1971). To our minds, the following works have made a far stron­
ger case. Readers might best start with Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco
and Vanzetti (New York, 1962), an expanded version of his famous Atlantic
Monthly critique of the case. This book reveals why the establishment reacted
so violently-to the extent that the Justice Department tapped Frankfurter's
phone until after the execution. Any reader who wishes to encounter Sacco
and Vanzetti through their own words can read Marion Frankfurter and
Gardner Jackson, eds., The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York, 1960).
Richard Newby, IGll Now, Talk Forever: Debating Sacco and Vanzetti (Bloom­
ington, IN, 2001), provides another valuable source of documents.
One work that recognized that this case had a social as well as a legal side
is Edmund M. Morgan and Louis Joughlin, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti
(New York, 1948). Morgan, like Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor, used
his expertise on rules of evidence to analyze the legal issues, while Joughlin, an
English professor, traced the strong effects of the case on intellectuals and writ­
ers. Another compelling treatment of the evidence, trial, and appeals procedure
is Herbert Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die (Boston, 1969). Erhmann
entered the case as an assistant to William Thompson. His first assignment was
to research the Medeiros confession. From that experience he developed a life­
long commitment to establish Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence. Reinforcement
ofEhrmann's case against the Medeiros gang is offered in Frank D'Allesandro,
The Verdict ofHistory: Sacco and Vanzetti (Providence, 1997).
After eighty years in which many people have spent nearly a lifetime of
digging, it might seem that historians would be hard-pressed to produce any
new evidence about this case. But William Young and David Kaiser, Post­
mortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Amherst, MA, 1985),
uncovered startling evidence of police improprieties, including extensive
wiretaps of the defense and its friends and tampering with the ballistics evi­
dence. Young and Kaiser make a powerful case that Sacco and Vanzetti were
innocent of robbery and murder. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anar­
chist Background (Princeton, 1991) , focuses attention on the anarchist move­
ment itself, including many previously untapped sources in Italian, that help
clarify Sacco and Vanzetti's involvement with the Idea and with a philoso­
phy of violence. Among the book's most startling revelations: Mike Boda,
apparently outraged by the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, drove a wagon full
of dynamite to Wall Street. The ensuing blast, notorious in American his­
tory, killed thirty-three people in September 1920.
PAST AND PRESENT

The Mending Wall?

The same year that officer Michael Connolly arrested Sacco and Vanzetti,
Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1921. The act aimed to close
America's borders to "the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America
and Southeastern Europe." Some eight decades later, American nativists
were still anxiously trying to close the United States' porous borders.
The problem of how to control the southern border was a complicated
one. On the one hand, by 2006 some 11 million illegal aliens already lived
in the United States. They provided a vital source of labor for tens of thou­
sands of farms and businesses. But each year millions more found their way
across a 1,951-mile-long border. In response, Congress adopted a plan for
fencing the most densely crossed areas. Two years later the Department of
Homeland Security announced that more than 500 miles of fence had been
constructed.
Many Americans objected in the 1920s that immigration restriction vio­
lated the spirit of the United States as a refuge for "huddled masses yearn­
ing to breathe free." The barrier across the U.S.-Mexican border proved
even more controversial. The battle was not simply between Democrats
and Republicans or liberals and conservatives. President George W. Bush
and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, both Republicans and con­
servatives, backed a "guest worker" program that would preserve the flow
of workers, as well as a plan to legalize the status of illegals already in the
country. Many equally conservative Republicans wanted the borders closed
and the illegal aliens ousted. All the two sides could agree on was a wall.
Even that solution provoked controversy. Three Native American tribes
objected because the barrier cut their lands in two. Human rights advo­
cates pointed out that the barrier pushed those crossing the border into
the Sonoran Desert, causing an increase in immigrants' deaths from dehy­
dration and exposure. Environmentalists were especially unhappy when in
April 2008 the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to waive
more than thirty environmental laws to speed construction. Critics in Ari­
zona and Texas asserted that the fence endangered migratory species and

282
 The Mending Wall? 2 83

fragile ecosystems along the Rio Grande. Laredo Mayor Raul G. Salinas
warned that the border wall would devastate his city. The people crossing
the border "are sustaining our economy by forty percent, and I am gonna
close the door on them and put [up] a wall? You don't do that. It's like a slap
in the face."
Perhaps poet Robert Frost best understood the controversy a wall could
bring. In his poem "Mending Wall," written on the eve of the 1921 restric­
tion act, he described how each spring he and his neighbor set out to repair
the wall that divided their properties. As they worked, his neighbor liked to
say, "good fences make good neighbors." So the narrator asked him why this
is so and added:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

His neighbor refused to speculate about the nature of walls and simply
repeated, "Good fences make good neighbors." But do they?
CHAPTER I 2

Dust Bowl Odyssey

Who were the millions who flooded into California during the
Depression? The census makes the invisible more visible.

The story begins with dust-not the thin coating on the shelf or the little
balls in the corner, but huge dark clouds of it. When the winds blew, they sucked
the dust into the sky to create blizzards. The dust storms began in earnest on
May 9, 1934.High winds captured dirt from Montana and Wyoming-some
350 million tons of it-and carried it eastward. By noon the dust began fall­
ing in Iowa and Wisconsin. That evening a brown grit fell like snow on
Chicago-four pounds for each inhabitant. Then the storm moved on. It
was dark in Buffalo at noon the next day, and the midday gloom covered
five states. On May 11 the dust sifted down as far south as Atlanta and as
far north as Boston. The following day, ships some 300 miles off the East
Coast noticed a film of brown dust on their decks.
Every year more storms blew: twenty-two in 1934 to a peak of seventy­
two by 193 7, then a gradual decline until finally the rains returned in the
1940s. Residents of the high western plains remembered 1935 as the worst
year. February brought temperatures in the seventies. With no snow cover
and no vegetation to hold it, the dirt flew. Even on calm days, a pervasive
grit fell everywhere on the southwestern plains. "In the morning," John
Steinbeck wrote, "the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new
blood.All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted
down. ... It settled on the corn, piled on the tops of the fence posts, piled
on the wires; it settled on roofs and blanketed weeds and trees." On May
15 Denver sent a warning that a dust storm was rolling eastward. Under a
clear blue sky, folks in Kansas paid little attention until around noon, when
the sky suddenly blackened. One movie patron leaving a theater expected to
walk into the blinding glare of daylight. Instead, he thought a prankster had
thrown a bag over his head. As he stepped outside, he bumped into a tele­
phone pole, tripped on cans and boxes, and finally found his way by crawling
along the curb.A young boy was less fortunate.He wandered out the door,
became disoriented, and suffocated in a dust drift.

284
 Dust B(ffJJ/ Odysse:r 285

The enormity of the dust storms at first inspired amazement and awe. That
sense of wonder soon gave way to despair as the constantly blowing dust turned day
into night and left people asking if "this was the wrath of God."

No matter what they tried, people could not escape the dust. Open the
door and the dust beat in your face. Shut the door tight and still "those tiny
particles seemed to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and
clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair
was gray and stiff and we ground dirt between our teeth."
Was this the wrath of God, as some plains dwellers thought? "This is the
ultimate darkness," one woman wrote in her diary. "So must come the end of
the world." Still, though the story of the Dust Bowl remains one of the sad­
dest chapters in American history, its coming could be explained by causes
more proximate than divine wrath. Drought had been a recurring feature of
the high plains that stretched northward from the Texas panhandle, New
Mexico, and western Oklahoma all the way through portions of Colorado,
Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. To survive extremes of heat
and cold, wind and drought, prairie grasses had developed deep roots. Those
grasses fed the buffalo and held the soil in place.
In the late nineteenth century, farmers had seen the grass as a nuisance to
be plowed under so they could exploit the rich soil beneath. Land that had
been suitable enough for grazing was turned into fields of cotton, wheat, and
com. Little did farmers heed the warn-
ing of those who described the area as
"R.ain folluws the plow, " but
the "Great American Desert," subscrib­
more often dustfolkrwed.
ing instead to the popular notion that
"rain follows the plow." Homestead
farmers sought to create an agrarian kingdom in which they "busted" and
"broke" the land into farms to feed their families, the nation, and the world.
2 86 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Photographer Dorothea Lange liked to place displaced Oklahoma migrants

against a background that suggested a central irony of the Depression era-want in
the midst of plenty. This picture reminded viewers that there was more than one
way to make the trip to California.

In 1934 the dust storms combined with the Great Depression to shatter
dreams of the West as the land of opportunity. The rains failed the farmers,
their crops withered, and the winds hurled the loose soil across the nation.
As the soil eroded year after year, so did farmers' resources and hopes.
John Steinbeck: told that story in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, and direc­
tor John Ford turned it into one of the most critically acclaimed movies of
all time. Most Americans now associate the Depression era with the Okies­
dispossessed farm families out of Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states­
and their rickety cars packed high with all they owned and heading along
Route 66 to California. \Vb.ether in Steinbeck's words, in Ford's images, in
the ballads of folk singer Woody Guthrie, or in the pictures taken by Farm
Security Administration (FSA) photographers such as Dorothea Lange, the
Okies and their flight from the Dust Bowl put a face on the tragedy ofAmer­
ica during the Great Depression.
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 287

Steinbeck's novel told of theJoad family in a near-biblical parable of suf­

fering, endurance, and dignity in the face of adversity. The nameJoad echoes
the name Job, and the voice of God comes through the ReverendJim Casy,
whose initials link him to Jesus Christ. The Joads' trek across the desert to
the promised land reminds us of Israel's lost tribes. It is a compelling story
with three major sections: the opening in Oklahoma, in which theJoads are
driven from their land; their odyssey across the desert on Route 66; and their
wanderings through California in a desperate search for work.
TheJoads are a simple family who for decades struggled to wrest a living
cropping cotton on a forty-acre plot near Sallisaw, Oklahoma. At first there
were five years of good crops "while the wild grass was still in her." Then it
became an "ever' year" kind of place. "Ever' year," TomJoad tells his friend
Jim Casy, "we had a good crop comin' an' it never came." Bad crops forced
the Joads to borrow from the bank. The crops kept failing, the debt kept
growing, and soon the bank owned
their farm. The Joads, along with hun­
"They was gonna stick her
dreds of thousands of plains farmers,
became sharecroppers who each year
out when the hank come to
gave the better part of their crop to a tractorin' off the place."
landowner or the bank. When Tom
Joad returns home after a stint in prison, he finds his family gone. His friend
Muley Graves explains that they have been driven from their farm: "they was
gonna stick her out when the bank come to tractorin' off the place." The
tractor that leveled the farmhouse also severed the vital connection between
theJoads and their land. They were almost literally uprooted and displaced.
Now the question became where to go. In the 1930s California beckoned
more than any other destination. The agrarian dream of economic suffi­
ciency and independence still glittered in the West. So the Joads pile all
their worldly goods and a family of twelve onto a jalopy and head down
Route 66. Steinbeck described the highway as

the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the
numbers of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow north­
ward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the
floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what richness is there. From
all of these the people are in flight.

The road proves a cruel taskmaster. Each repair of their weather-beaten

auto eats into theJoads' shrinking cash reserve. The weaker members of the
family die or wander off. In the roadside camps, however, the Joads often
meet other refugees who give help and comfort, share what little they have,
and join theJoads in reestablishing ties to the places they have left behind.
In California the dream turns into a nightmare. The Joads do indeed dis­
cover the land of milk and honey. Rich farms and fertile fields roll across a vast
landscape. Yet that abundance is off-limits to the Okies. Californians treat them
like vermin, vigilante mobs attack them, labor agents cheat them, strikebreakers
threaten them, and worst of all, work at a living wage proves nearly impossible
288 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

to find. Unable to provide, the men lose their place at the head of the family. In
the end, MaJoad's faith holds the remnants of the family together. But in a final
irony, these Dust Bowl refugees face the peril of rising floodwaters.

THE SPECIFIC VERSUS THE COLLECTIVE

Many Americans come away from the Joads' story convinced that Stein­
beck recorded the central tragedy of America in the 1930s. Yet no single
story, however powerful or popular, can capture the collective experience of
hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. A historian wants to know
just how typical the Joads were-of Americans, of migrants to California, or
even simply of Okies during the Great Depression. After all, Steinbeck was
a novelist seeking to tell a story of people dispossessed from the land. Unlike
a historian, he was not bound by strict rules of evidence and explanation,
only by the desire to explore the human condition. Yet Steinbeck gained the
respect of his readers in part because he based much of his novel on direct
observation. Like many writers of the 1930s, he used a reporter's techniques
to research his story, visiting Oklahoma, traveling Route 66, and touring
California's migrant labor camps.
Social scientists and government officials of Steinbeck's day confirmed
much of what he wrote. They, too, reported the drought conditions that
drove farm families out of the plains, the hostility of Californians to refu­
gees, and the destitution of many migrants. Yet we have already seen that
the historian must rigorously question the testimony of social scientists and
journalists as much as novelists. Even the apparently objective photographs
taken by that "mirror with a memory" need to be scrutinized.
Take, for example, the case of photographer Dorothea Lange and her
husband, Paul Taylor, an agricultural economist from the University of Cal­
ifornia at Berkeley. Like Steinbeck, Lange and Taylor followed the migrant
trail from Oklahoma through Texas and across the desert to the migrant
camps in California. Lange was one of many photographers hired by the
FSA to document rural life in the 1930s. She and Taylor published a book,
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, that described the destruc­
tion of the plains and the impoverishment of a proud people. Yet Taylor and
Lange were hardly disinterested observers-much to their credit, one can
argue. Like Steinbeck, they believed that the migrants needed help. And all
three went looking for evidence to make that case.
The story of Lange's most famous photograph is instructive. One March
morning in 1936 she was driving up California Highway 101 toward San
Francisco. Eager to be home, she hurried past a hand-painted sign directing
passersby to a pea-pickers' camp. Some impulse made her turn back. What
she saw staggered her, even though she had spent months investigating the
conditions of migrant farm laborers. The camp contained more than two
thousand men, women, and children huddled against the cold and driving
rain in ragged tents and flimsy wood shelters. They had come to pick peas,
 Dust B()'WJ Odyssey 289

The collection of Dorothea Lange's work in the Library of Congress shows

th.at she was far more than a "one-picture" photographer. She traveled extensively
and photographed a wide variety of Depression-era scenes. "Migrant Mother," her
most famous photograph, was actually taken as the final in a series of six separate
shots. What is it about "Migrant Mother#6" (/eft) that makes it more affecting than
"Migrant Mother#1" (right)?

but the weather left them without work or wages. And with nowhere to go
and no relief from local, state, or federal officials, they waited. First their
money ran out, then their food. By the time Lange arrived, they were des­
perate. How was she to give voice to their need?
That day Lange took a photograph that must rank as one of the most
widely viewed images of the decade. She entitled it "Migrant Mother."
Her subject was Florence Thompson, age thirty-two, the recently widowed
mother of six children. What Lange captured was the quiet dignity of a
woman at the end of hope, cradling an infant in her arms with two young
children clinging to her shoulders. She had just sold the tires off her car
to buy food for her family. As Lange intended, the image put a personal
face to a need so compelling that few people could turn away. Along with
Steinbeck's tale of the Joads, "Migrant Mother" made Americans aware of
the story of the Dust Bowl refugees.
Lange and other FSA photographers did not simply arrive at a camp and
begin taking pictures. To get the image she wanted, Lange often posed her
subjects. She sometimes even suggested to them where to look or what to do
with their hands. In the case of Florence Thompson, Lange recalled, "she
seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.
There was a sort of equality about it." Lange took six different photographs,
each time looking for a more compelling shot. In the first, one child was
smiling at the camera, defusing the desperation of the situation. Lange then
290 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

EXTENT OF AREA SUBJECT TO SEVERE WIND EROSION

1935-1940

@
Topeka

Kansas
Santa Fe
/
@
___ ,_
I
I
New Mexico I
- I
\ .....
\
' I
'
.../

Texas

Austin
@

Explanation
:--1 Severe wind erosion
L __ I in 1935-1936
f--] Severe wind erosion
L __ I in 1938
Severe wind erosion
in 1940
• Most severe wind erosion
in 1935-1938

tried a longer view of the tent; then moved in to focus on the mother and
her baby. In the final, telling shot, Thompson, of her own accord, raised her
" "
hand to her chin. LOOK IN HER EYES, ran the headline in Midweek Pictorial
when it first ran the photo. "This woman is watching something happen to
America and to herself and her children who are part of America."
Both Lange and Steinbeck adopted the time-tested literary technique of
allowing a part to stand for the whole. The two created images so vivid,
stories so concrete, they would be remembered long after the bland gen­
eralizations of bureaucratic reports were forgotten. Yet here, in the matter
of the concrete and the specific, is precisely where historians so often begin
their skeptical cross-examinations. One way of identifying biases or limiting
perspectives is to examine a broader sample. To what degree do Steinbeck's
vivid stories and Lange's wrenching photographs reflect the collective real­
ity they are taken to symbolize?
Even a casual glance at the Joads' story suggests that Steinbeck painted
with a broad, sometimes imprecise brush. To begin with, the Joads did not
live in what was physically the Dust Bowl. While drought affected a vast
region from the Dakotas to Texas, geographers place the Dust Bowl in an
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 2 91

area in the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle that spills over into western Kan­
sas and eastern parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Sallisaw, from which
the Joads hailed, lay in the eastern part of Oklahoma, several hundred miles
outside the Dust Bowl. Rolling hills and oaks, not prairie and short grasses,
formed the landscape. And corn, rather than cotton, was the primary crop.
As one historian remarked, "Steinbeck's geography, like that of most Ameri­
cans, was a bit hazy; any place in Oklahoma, even on the Ozark Plateau,
must be Dust Bowl country, he assumed."
Still, this point seems a small one, given the wide reach of those rolling
black clouds. Even if the Joads were not technically from the Dust Bowl,
surely most of the Okies who migrated to California were farm refugees
from the dust storms. Or were they? Here, too, the facts get in the way of
the image Steinbeck made popular. Statistics show that California gained
more than a million new residents in the 1930s. In fact, however, no more
than about 15,000 to 16,000 of those people came from the Dust Bowl-well
under 2 percent. In imagining the Joads, Steinbeck was implicitly portraying
a much broader group of southwestern emigrants from four states: "agricul­
tural laborers" and "farm workers" not only from Oklahoma but also Arkan­
sas, Texas, and Missouri. Because this group amounted to about one-third
of the newcomers to California, we might say that, strictly speaking, the
Joads are more accurately representative of displaced agricultural labor than
of Dust Bowl refugees.
The minute we begin talking about collective experiences, of course, we run
headlong into numbers. To understand the great migration of the Depression
decade, historians must place the Joads in a statistical context. What links them
to the million people who reached California between 1930 and 1940? Unfor­
tunately the mere mention of numbers-statistics or columns of figures-is
enough to make the eyes of many readers glaze over. It is only natural to prefer
Steinbeck's way of personifying the Dust Bowl refugees.
Yet the numbers cannot be avoided if we are to paint an accurate picture.
The challenge for the historian lies in bringing statistics to life so they tell a
story with some of the human qualities that Lange and Steinbeck invested in
their subjects. In looking at the 1930s in
particular, historians are lucky because
The challenge for the historian
social scientists and government offi­
lies in bringing statistics to life
cials tried hard to quantify the human
circumstances of the era. In particular, so they tell a story.
historians of the Dust Bowl era have
been able to benefit from the federal population count of 1940, which was
the first modern census.
The federal census had been taken every decade since 1790, because its
data were needed to apportion each state's seats in the House of Representa­
tives, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution. For the first fifty
years, federal marshals did the actual counting, by locating households within
their districts and recording the number of people living there. Over time
the nature of the information collected became broader and more detailed; it
292 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

included social statistics about taxes collected, real estate values, wages, edu­
cation, and crime. In 1880 Congress shifted responsibility for the census from
the marshals to specially appointed experts trained to collect not only popu­
lation statistics but also data on manufacturing and other economic activities.
By 1890 punch cards stored data, and an electric tabulating machine pro­
cessed those cards. Mechanization, by vastly reducing calculation time, made
it possible to accumulate more complex and varied information.
The census of 1940, because of advanced statistical techniques used by the
enumerators, was even more comprehensive than its predecessors. Social sci­
entists and opinion pollsters such as George Gallup had experimented during
the 1930s with probability sampling. To measure unemployment rates in 1940,
for example, they constructed a group of some 20,000 households to represent
a cross section of the nation as a whole. The data from this small sample gave
the social scientists statistics that accurately (though not exactly) reflected the
national employment pattern. Other questions in the 1940 census were asked
of just 5 percent of the households. That allowed the Census Bureau to pub­
lish detailed tables on many more subjects, not the least of which was internal
migration. In so doing, they provided historians with a way of determining
how representative the Joads actually were of the Dust Bowl refugees.

HISTORY BY THE NUMBERS

Historian James Gregory went to the census records in his own attempt to
analyze the Dust Bowl migration. In each of the censuses from 1910 to 1970,
he was able to find statistics on Americans born in western regions of the
South (Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas) who had moved to Cali­
fornia. By comparing these numbers decade to decade, he could also estimate
how many new southwesterners arrived every ten years. Take a moment to
look at the table below.

Western South Natives Living outside the Region, 1910-1970

Living outside Living in Net Calif. Percentage of

reg10n California mcrease Calif. pop.

1910 661,094 103,241 4.3%

1920 1,419,046 187,471 84,230 5.5%

1930 2,027,139 430,810 243,339 7.6%

1940 2,580,940 745,934 315,124 10.8%

1950 3,887,370 1,367,720 621,786 12.9%

1960 4,966,781 1,734,271 366,551 11.0%

1970 5,309,287 1,747,632 13,361 8.8%

Sources:U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the United States, Population: 1910, Vol. 1, 732-733; 1920, Vol. 11,
628--629; 1930, Vol. H, 155-156; 1940, State
ofBirth, 17-18; 1950, State ofBirth, 20--24; 1960, State ofBirth, 22-23;
1970, State ofBirth, 28-29.
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 2 93

The story of the Joads would lead us to hypothesize that between 1930
and 1940 a large number of migrants left the southwestern plains states for
California. Drought and economic hardships drove them out. Because so
many settled in California, we would further assume that conditions special
to that state drew the refugees there.
At first glance, the statistics support the hypothesis.The number of south­
westerners in California in 1940 was 745,934.Subtracting the residents that
were already there in 1930 (430,810), we discover that some 315,124 south­
westerners moved to California during the decade in which the severe dust
storms took place (this number is shown for 1940 under the column heading
"Net California Increase").Of course, there is a certain false precision here.
Common sense tells us that at least some southwesterners living in Califor­
nia who were counted in the 1930 census must have returned home, moved
to an entirely new state, or died over the next ten years. In that case, the
actual number of migrants arriving must have been greater, though we have
no reliable way of knowing how much greater.But the bureau has estimated
that the total number of southwestern migrants might have been as many as
400,000.In other words, the number in our table-315,124-may have been
off by 85,000 people, enough to populate a medium-sized city.
A migrant total approaching half a million is surely high. But we must
ask another question.Is there a causal connection between the drought and
migration, or is the link merely coincidental? The anecdotal evidence of
one journalist suggests an intriguing clue. He reported seeing Oklahoma
farmers "in their second-hand flivvers [inexpensive Model-T Fords], piled
high with furniture and family ...pouring through the divides by the hun­
dreds." It is the kind of literary detail that might have come straight out of
Steinbeck.The problem is that the reporter was writing in 1926, eight years
before the first dust storm.We begin to see the reason that James Gregory,
in compiling his table, sought data over a sixty-year period. The broader
time span provides a better yardstick of comparison. To make the point
visually, we have taken the information from the "Net California Increase"
column and displayed it as a bar graph on page 294.
As the bar graph reveals, during the 1920s nearly a quarter of a million
southwesterners migrated to California-nearly as many as came during
the "dirty thirties" of the Dust Bowl years. Small wonder that a reporter
could speak, in 1926, of hundreds of flivvers crowding the mountain passes.
And the 1920s, by contrast, were
years of average rainfall.Equally
Numbers suggest that factors besides
notable, the number of arriv­
drought, dust storms, and the
als virtually doubles during the
Depression were driving people from 1940s, a time when rain and bet­
the southwestern plains. ter economic times had returned
to the Southwest, mostly because
of massive industrial growth stimulated by World War IL Even in the post­
war decade of 1950-1960, the migration of southwesterners remained heavy.
Such numbers suggest that factors besides drought, dust storms, and the
294 APTER TIIE FACT: Tm. ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

WESTERN SOUTH NATIVES ARRIVING IN CALIFORNIA, 1910-1970

1910-1920 19�1930 193�1940 1940-1950 195�1960 1960-1970

Depression were driving people from the southwestern plains or drawing

them to California.
Steinbeck's powerful imagery provides one suggestion for explaining this
broader trend: the tractor that knocked down the Joads' house. \Vhy, we
might ask, were tractors rumbling across the farmland, driving people from
their homes? Steinbeck offered an explanation: "At last the owner men came
to the point. The tenant system won't work any more.One man on a tractor
can take the place of twelve or fourteen families.Pay him a wage and take
all the crop." The owners took no responsibility for what they and their
tractors did.It was "the bank." that gave the order, and the bank was "some­
thing more than men.... It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't con­
trol it." \Vb.en the tenants protest that their fiunilies had "killed the weeds
and snakes " to make way for their farms, the owners show cold indiffer­
ence. "The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner, can't be responsible," they
explain."You're on land that isn't yours." When the tenants complain that
they have no money and nowhere else to go, the owners responded, "\Vhy
don't you go to California? There's work there and it never gets cold."
The tractor symbolized a complex process of agricultural reorganization
through absentee landownership, mechanization, and corporatization. Dur­
ing the late nineteenth century, farmers had flooded into the southwestern
plains-the nation's final agricultural frontier.Through World War I they
realized generally high prices for their crops. All the same, many farmers
had arrived with few resources other than the labor they and their families
could perform. One bad crop,one dry year,and they were facing debt. Once
in debt, they had to buy on credit and borrow on future crops.As a result,
sharecropping and tenantry had become widespread even in flush times.
During the 1920s, though industry boomed, the agricultural economy
went into decline. Prices for agricultural staples including cotton, wheat,
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 295

and corn fell. Overfarming depleted the soil. Such factors created conditions
under which too many people were trying to farm land that could no longer
support them. Between 1910 and 1930, well before the great dust storms,
the number of farmers and agricultural workers in the region fell by about
341,000 and some 1.3 million people left, of which about 430,800 settled
in California. A majority of the farmers who remained in the region rented
land or cropped on shares. By the 1930s landowners had come to realize that
they could increase profits by driving off their tenants, by consolidating their
acreage into larger, more efficient farms, and by using tractors and other
machines rather than human labor.
So the explanation for the exodus from the plains would need to include a
discussion of agricultural reorganization and the mechanization of farming.
Steinbeck's vivid portrait of the bankers' tractors acknowledged this real­
ity, but the novel's pervasive images of dust overwhelm it somewhat. These
findings do not mean we should dismiss The Grapes of Wrath, merely that
we should study the numbers on migration a little more closely. Were those
migrants who left between 1910 and 1930 the same kinds of people who left
in the 1930s? Did they leave for the same reasons?
Because the 1940 census was so much more comprehensive than those
that preceded it, we actually know more about the Dust Bowl-era migrants
than about those who traveled in previous decades. The 1930 census tells us,
for example, that the population of rural counties in Oklahoma, Missouri,
and Arkansas dropped in the 1920s, but not whether people left the region.
Many may have gone into the cities or to work in the booming oil fields. All
the same, it seems most likely that the migrants of the 1920s were a more
prosperous group than those of the next decade. Despite the popular image
of the West as a "safety valve" for the poor from the East, over the course
of American history the majority of pioneer farmers were neither rich nor
poor. The West attracted largely middle-class folk drawn to the promise of
economic opportunity rather than driven out by harsh circumstances.
Elbert Garretson seems representative of the middling sort of people mak­
ing up migrants before the Great Depression. Garretson saw that lower crop
prices and declining soil fertility had weakened his chances to succeed at farm­
ing. So he packed up his family and took a job in a California steel mill. His plan
was to get on his feet financially so he could continue to farm in Oklahoma.
Several times the Garretsons returned to Oklahoma, but each time the lure of
California proved stronger. Finally, Garretson sold the farm as a bad bet.
During the 1920s the lure for migrants was even stronger because Cali­
fornia farmers faced a shortage of agricultural labor. To attract workers, they
often paid the railroad fares of southwesterners who would emigrate. "The
farmers would meet you at the trains," one woman recalled. Another family
went "because we could see the promise of the cotton future here, and we
were cotton ranchers." Poorer people like theJoads surely felt the draw, too,
but they were more likely tied by debt to their "ever' year" farms.
What differed in the 1930s was not so much the numbers of those who
went but their identities. Of all the regions of the United States, none suffered
2 96 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

more economic devastation during the Great Depression than the southwest
plains. The once-robust oil industry collapsed in a glut of overproduction.
Unemployment in the region hit one-third of all workers. Infestations of
locusts and boll weevils added to the woes of farmers long afflicted by drought
and low crop prices. In the two years before Franklin Roosevelt became presi­
dent, creditors foreclosed the mortgages of some 10 percent of Oklahoma's
farms. As a result, the migrants of the 1930s included many more desperately
poor and displaced families like the Joads.
When Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933, he placed
the agricultural crisis at the top of his agenda. Still, it was far from clear
what government could do to ease the farmers' plight. One of the New
Deal's most ambitious measures during the president's Hundred Day
program for relief, recovery, and reform was the Agricultural Adjust­
ment Act. New Dealers sought to ease farm distress by providing credit,
reducing overproduction, and raising prices. One strategy was to offer
farmers a cash subsidy to take land out of production. Over the next
eight years, desperate southwestern farmers so eagerly sought the sub­
sidy that they reduced their cotton acreage by 12.5 million acres, or more
than 50 percent.
This strategy contains one of the central ironies of the Dust Bowl cri­
sis. Along with the drought and the "monster" bank, the good intentions of
the federal government helped to account for the wave of tractors driving
people like the Joads from their land. To receive a crop subsidy, landown­
ers had to reduce the acreage they planted. The easiest way to do that was
to evict tenants. Landowners could consolidate their best lands and farm
them with tractors, while letting tenant lands return to grass. One landlord
boasted that "I bought tractors on the money the government give me and
got shet o' my renters." So common was that practice that by 1940, tenantry
had decreased by 24 percent. "They got their choice," the same landlord
remarked curtly. "California or WPA [Works Progress Administration, a
federal relief agency]."
If only the choice had been so simple. Unlike the 1920s, when Califor­
nia and the urban centers of the Southwest attracted rural folk with new
opportunities, displaced tenants in the 1930s had few practical options. By
this time California had a glut of agricultural workers, and the southwest­
ern cities had higher unemployment than the rural counties did. The New
Deal did offer help. During the early duster years of 1934 and 1935, the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided funds to some 2.5 mil­
lion southwestern families, about 20 percent of the population. But the
aid proved woefully inadequate. In most areas of the country, the states
supplemented federal relief payments, but not in the Southwest. Through­
out the 1930s, some 20 percent to 35 percent of all families in the region
suffered from extreme poverty and unemployment. This situation is one
area in which the story of the Joads brings the plight of 193Os migrants into
clear focus.
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 297

THE ROAD
As the Great Depression worsened, Roy Turner and his family migrated to
a shantytown outside the Oklahoma City stockyards. These encampments
(often nicknamed Hoovervilles, after President Herbert Hoover) appeared
in many urban areas. In Oklahoma City, the Turners joined some 2,000
others living off a mixture of relief, part-time jobs, and declining hopes. The
Turners described their home as "old automobiles, old lard cases, buckets,
paste board." For food they had little more than the milk from the stock-pen
cows. When conditions became unbearably grim, the family pulled together
what few belongings they had and headed down Route 66-"walking, me
and my wife and two babies," hoping to hitch rides on the 1,200-mile trip to
California.
Here indeed is a family much like the Joads, though their path to Califor­
nia involved a stop for several years in an urban center. But the Turners and
Joads-desperately poor, without jobs, and without prospects-were only
one element of the southwestern surge to California. When James Gregory
examined the Census Bureau statistics as well as other surveys, he discovered
some surprising percentages. For example, in 1939 the Bureau of Agricul­
tural Economics surveyed the occupations of about 116,000 families who
had come to California in the 1930s. The results of that data are displayed in
the graph on page 298.
As the chart indicates, only 43 percent of southwesterners were doing farm­
work immediately before they migrated. Farmers were a definite minority. In
fact, nearly one-third of all migrants were professional or white-collar work­
ers. The 1940 census showed similar results. Southwesterners who moved
to California between 193 5 and 1940 were asked to list their residence as of
April 1, 193 5. Only 36 percent reported that they were living on a farm.
With these numbers, as with all statistics, it is important to look critically
at the method of collection. The census enumerators of 1940 reported that
rural residents, to simplify answering the question of residence, would some­
times merely list the nearest town or city, which gave the mistaken impres­
sion that those people lived in an urban area. Even taking these biases into
account, however, it seems that Steinbeck (and many historians as well) have
exaggerated the numbers of farmers in the migrant stream. Other factors
distinguish the actual migrants from the Joads. Of the twelve travelers in the
Joads' old Hudson, five were well over forty years old. By contrast, most of
the actual migrants were younger-60 percent of the adult travelers were
under age thirty-five. Unlike the Joads, the actual migrants were slightly
better educated than those who remained behind. The Joads were typical
in gender balance, since the majority of migrants traveled as families. (In
the broader history of American migration, this family movement is rather
unusual, because single males more commonly predominate among migrat­
ing populations.) All the same, large extended families like the Joads were
rare. The average southwestern migrant family had 4.4 members.
298 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

14% Unskilled and

domestic laborers

13% Semi-skilled/service
43% Farmers and
farm laborers

21% White-collar and

skilled laborers 8% Proprietors and
professionals

Premigration occupations of California migrants from west south-central

states. (Data from American &odus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in
California by James N. Gregory. Copyright© 1991 by James N. Gregory. Used by
permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.)

Finally, there is the matter of race. Like 95 percent of all southwestern

migrants to California, theJoads were white. This was not because few Afri­
can Americans lived in Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma. In 1930 the
black population in those four states was approximately 1. 7 million. Many of
these African Americans were farmers or agricultural laborers, and thousands
left the region between 1910 and 1930. However, most migrated to urban
centers in the North and upper Midwest, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh,
where they already had relatives or friends. Among those black southwest­
erners who headed to California, the great majority settled in Los Angeles.
Even so, by 1940 the black population there was only about 64,000 out of
1.5 million residents. (And a mere 5 ,000 African Americans resided in San
Francisco.)
Steinbeck's account of the Joads' trip west leads us to another question­
about the quality of the trip itself. The Grapes of Wrath devotes a third of its
tale to theJoads' struggle to reach California. The book gives no exact dates,
but the Joads were on the road long enough to have many hardships and
adventures. They reached California weeks after their journey began. Read­
ing of such tribulations, a reader might well wonder why so many people
risked the trip if it was such an ordeal.
But the collective portrait that historians have assembled about migration
journeys suggests that, for most peo­
ple, the odyssey was not so wrenching. For most people, the odyssey was
Here, the evidence is mostly anecdotal. not so wrenching.
The census collected no systematic
information on the length of the journey or conditions along the way. But
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 2 99

social scientists and reporters interviewed Okies and recorded oral histo­
ries of their experience. Although the individual misfortunes that Steinbeck
ascribed to the Joads no doubt happened to some migrants, most found the
trip less harrowing.
Take, for example, the hopes that drew people to the road. To the Joads,
California was little more than a blurry set of ideas based on rumors, legends,
gossip, and handbills sent to Oklahoma by labor agents. Certainly, many
people headed for California with unreasonable expectations. Two young
researchers who were hired by the Library of Congress to collect folklore
recorded this verse:

They said in California

that money grew on trees,
that everyone was going there,
just like a swarm of bees.

State tourist agencies encouraged such illusions. California was the place to
come for a grand vacation of sun and fun. T he Hollywood film industry por­
trayed the state as a glamorous alternative to the dark urban settings it used
for films about social problems and crime.
But precisely because California officials feared that destitute job seekers
would overrun their state, they repeatedly sought to dispel such fantasies,
sending word that conditions in California were desperate. More than one
migrant family must have thought twice about the journey after seeing a
billboard along Route 66 near Tulsa announced in bold letters:

NO JOBS in California.
If you are looking for work-KEEP OUT
6 men for every job
No State Relief available for Non-residents

Neither the dire warnings nor the glamorous tourist brochures were
accurate. Although California's economy suffered and unemployment
remained serious, the state in the 1930s was much better off than most
of the nation. Its farms grew some one hundred different crops, and such
diversification made California agriculture less vulnerable to overpro­
duction and falling prices. Other industries also weathered the depres­
sion better than most. Industrial workers in California generally received
higher hourly wages than did the same workers in other regions. The state
economy actually grew during the 1930s. For those unable to find work
or who lost jobs, the state had the nation's best relief benefits-$40 per
month as opposed to $10 to $12 in the Southwest. All these facts sug­
gest that folks who left the southern plains had reason to pick California
as their destination. As one Texan remarked, "Well, if they have lots of
work out there and if relief is good, then if I don't find work I' ll still be
all right."
Furthermore, unlike theJoads, many of the migrants traveling along Route
66 had relatives and friends already living in California. By 1930 more than
300 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

400,000 former southwesterners resided in the state, creating a solid base

for what demographers call "migration chains." Much like worldwide immi­
grants to America did, southwesterners wrote home to relatives. Such letters
"gits the folks back home to talkin' that work is pretty good in California,"
explained one Oklahoman, "so they decide to pull up stakes and come." One
message made a particularly powerful impression: "Everyone writes back that
he's heeled. He's got him a job." Equally important, relatives offered newly
arrived migrants a place to stay and help in getting started. During the 1920s
and 1930s, entire communities of Okies and Arkies (migrants from Arkansas)
sprang up in California's agricultural valleys. Unlike the Joads, more than half
of the Dust Bowl migrants left for California with a destination in mind.
Novelists and reporters dramatized the hardships of the road because it
made a good story; indeed, much of The Grapes of Wrath fits the popular
literary genre of a "road novel." Just as Huck Finn's character deepened as
he and the runaway slave Jim floated down the broad Mississippi, so the
Joads were transformed by their trials along Route 66. But as one historian
observed, Steinbeck wrote in tones "more justly reserved for the era of cov­
ered wagons." By the 1930s good highways, bus routes, and railroads linked
the southwestern plains to California. A family with a decent car could make
the trip in about three or four days.

CALIFORNIA
About 15 0 miles after crossing the state line, Route 66 entered the town of
Barstow, California. There, travelers faced a significant choice. Should they
follow the highway as it veered south into the sprawling city of Los Angeles?
Or should they take the smaller road out of Barstow, not entirely paved, that
wound through the Tehachapi Mountains and into the San Joaquin Valley?
The decision was a fateful one.
The Joads chose the route to the valley. But as you may have suspected
(based on the census data we have already reviewed), most southwestern
migrants did not. The majority hailed from urban areas, and during the
years 1935 to 1940 at least, nearly 70 percent chose to make their residence
in urban California. That figure is somewhat misleading because, as we
shall see, many agricultural laborers settled in cities and migrated to vari­
ous farm jobs from season to season. Still, Los Angeles remained the most
popular destination for southwesterners, attracting more than one-third of
all migrants.
Only 28 percent of the Dust Bowl's refugees found their way, like the
Joads, to the San Joaquin Valley. Most of those who did harbored the same
dreams that had inspired so many Americans throughout the nineteenth
century: to take possession of their own family farms. California, after all,
boasted plenty of cotton fields, just like back home. Migrants assumed they
could work in the fields at a living wage until they could save enough to pur­
chase some land. It was the same pattern of hope that had sent many of their
forebears to the Southwest. But California surprised them.
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 301

The sights greeting newcomers to the SanJoaquin Valley were both tan­
talizing and troubling. As the Joads roll down the highway, Pa stares at the
countryside transfixed: "I never knowed they was anything like her." Before
him lie the "peach trees and the walnut
groves, and the dark green patches of ""Where are the farmhouses?"
oranges." Just the look of the place struck
migrants as somehow vaster and stranger than the plains they left behind. And
something else seemed odd. Amidst the broad fields and orchards spreading
for miles and miles, migrants saw few signs of the agrarian kingdom of small
farms they were expecting. ""Where are the farmers?" one newcomer asks.
And even more puzzling: ""Where are the farmhouses?"
To be sure, farms had hardly vanished from the landscape. In 1929 some
90 percent of California's 135,000 farms produced crops valued at less than
$30,000 a year. Thirty percent had crops worth less than $1,000. But those
smaller farmers lacked political or economic clout. Of all American farms
producing crops worth more than $30,000 a year, more than one-third lay
in California. Thus large corporations and landowners dominated the state's
agriculture. Some crops, including citrus fruits and raisins, were organized
into centrally controlled marketing cooperatives. (Sunkist was one such
example.) Cotton, the crop Okies knew best, was a bit less organized. Even
so, just four companies ginned two-thirds of the cotton, and a web of cor­
porate farms, banks, and the SanJoaquin Valley Agricultural Bureau kept a
tight rein on production levels and labor costs. In fact, California only per­
mitted farmers to grow one kind of high-quality cotton.
Most migrants coming into the valley had little time to think of buying
land; they faced the more pressing task of simply surviving. Like the Joads,
most timed their arrival in California for September, the beginning of the
cotton harvest. Growers estimated that a good worker might earn $3 to
$4 a day, about twice the wage in the Southwest. But agricultural employ­
ment in cotton virtually ceased between December and March. That was
the rainy season, when temperatures, though milder than back home, often
dipped into the thirties. Some lucky families found shelter in labor camps.
A few landowners allowed migrants to stay on in one-room shacks. More
often, home was a squatter village of tents, old cars, and shanties made from
wood scraps. Under conditions of poverty and malnutrition, disease spread
quickly, especially among the old and young. This was the scene that Doro­
thea Lange discovered when she photographed her "Migrant Mother."
So The Grapes of Wrath remains closest to history when Steinbeck
describes the plight of the Joads during 193 7-193 8, the worst and wettest
California winter of the era. In 193 7, when the Roosevelt administration cut
back on spending in the belief that the nation was on its way to recovery,
the economy collapsed. Unemployment returned to levels much like those
before the New Deal. Not surprisingly, migration reached a peak that year.
And then the rains came. Floods, as Steinbeck depicted, wiped out entire
squatter camps, often leaving the residents homeless. The situation became
so desperate that private charities and government agencies finally swung
302 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

into action-just as Lange and Steinbeck had hoped. The FSA offered medi­
cal care and relief to families who could not meet California's one-year resi­
dency requirement for public assistance.
After that winter, the worst was over. Within two years the rains returned
to the plains, while World War II brought back prosperity and a virtual end
to unemployment. No longer did migrants face the same struggle for sur­
vival that theJoads experienced in California.

THE OTHER MIGRANTS

The collective portrait of the Okies, drawn by Gregory and other historians,
demonstrates the strengths of Steinbeck's searing novel as well as its limita­
tions. In effect, the census and other numerical data serve as a framework,
within which we can set not only Steinbeck's specific tale but also the news­
paper reports, photographs, contemporary sociological studies, and oral rec­
ollections that have been left behind in the historical record. The structure
of the numbers allows us to give Steinbeck and the other evidence its proper
due without mistaking a part for the whole.
In the same way, the discipline of the numbers is also invaluable for plac­
ing the newly arrived Okies within their larger California context. Because
Steinbeck's tale focuses on the Okies alone, historians have come to appreci­
ate that the tale is inevitably partial in the picture it gives of California's agri­
cultural labor force. Another set of numbers makes the point. In 1930 that
labor force was 43 percent white, 21 percent Mexican, 17 percent European,
8 percent Filipino, and 7 percentJapanese.
That multicultural influence is mirrored by another data set, this one
illustrating the wide diversity of crops grown in the SanJoaquin Valley. The
map on page 303 shows not only cotton but also grapes, potatoes, peaches,
plums, olives, figs, oranges, rice, beans, cherries, tomatoes, and so on. Small
wonder Pa Joad was taken aback. And the diversity of both the agriculture
and its labor force are related. Americans today take for granted the variety
of California produce. But these crops are hardly "natural." Most were not
raised by the original Spanish settlers, nor were they the choice of Anglo
newcomers from the East during the mid-nineteenth century, whose pref­
erence was to plant familiar crops like wheat. The diversity of California
agriculture arose only in the late nineteenth century-at the same time that
its labor force was becoming increasingly diverse.
To begin with, the Chinese who arrived in the wake of the 1848 gold rush
played a vital part in introducing fruit orchards. Many Chinese immigrants
who had once farmed along the Pearl and Yellow Rivers turned their ener­
gies in America to constructing irrigation channels, dikes, and levies in the
delta regions of the SanJoaquin and Sacramento Rivers. Swampy land that
sold for only $28 an acre in 1875 was soon being snapped up at $100 an
acre. The Chinese also brought valuable horticultural experience in growing
orchard and garden crops. One immigrant to the United States, Ah Bing,
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 303

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY 1930

D Cotton

37°

35°

120°

A rich array of fruits and vegetables grow in California's San Joaquin Valley.
Such variety reduced the impact of the Depression on the state's agricultural
economy and helps explain why the valley became a destination for families like
the Joads. (From American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Mig;ration and Okie Culture in
California by James N. Gregory. Copyright© 1991 by James N. Gregory. Used by
permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.)

bred the renowned Bing cherry; in Florida, Lue Gim Gong developed a
frost-resistant orange.
Anti-Asian nativism, especially strong in California, led Congress to pass
the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning the entry of Chinese laborers after
1882. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of Japanese immigrants continued
the transformation of California agriculture, especially after 1900. By 1910
Japanese farmers were producing 70 percent of California's strawberries. By
1940 they grew 95 percent of its snap beans as well as spring and summer
celery, and they actively cultivated a host of other crops. As Colonel John
Irish, president of the California Delta Association, commented in 1921,
Californians
304 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OP HISTORICAL DETECTION

Mexican farmworkers organized a number of major labor actions against

California's growers. Such action is one reason the growers were so willing to
replace them with southwestern migrants. The Dust Bowl migrants had no similar
tradition of labor activism and community organization. The Mexican women on
this truck were making an appeal to strikebreakers to join their strike.

had seen the Japanese convert the barren land like that at Florin and Liv­
ingston into productive and profitable fields, orchards and vineyards, by the
persistence and intelligence of their industry. They had seen the hardpan and
goose lands in the Sacramento Valley, gray and black with our two destructive
alkalis, cursed with barrenness like the fig tree of Bethany, and not worth pay­
ing taxes on, until Ikuta [a Japanese immigrant] decided that those lands would
raise rice. After years of persistent toil, and enduring heartbreaking losses and
disappointments, he conquered that rebellious soil and raised the first com­
mercial crop of rice in California.

The restrictive immigration acts of the 1920s, however, once again reshaped
California's labor pool, drastically limiting the inflow of workers from most
nations and banning Asian immigration entirely. No longer could Califor­
nians find European or Japanese immigrants to tend their fields. Facing a
labor shortage, they turned to Mexicans and, to a lesser extent, to Filipinos,
who were still allowed entry because the Philippines was a U.S. territory.
A look at the numbers and background ofMexican laborers dispels a stereo­
type similar to the one we have already rejected about southwestern migrants.
Most Mexicans who labored in California in 1930 were hardly simple peas­
ants straight from the Mexican countryside. More often they were laborers
possessing a variety of skills, whose migration resulted from the industrializa­
tion spreading through Mexico after the 1890s. For example, Braulio Lopez,
a worker who picked cotton in the San Joaquin Valley, had worked on the
Mexican railroad before coming north. In the United States Lopez had also
 Dust B<IWI Odyssey 305

The &ded Spanish on the older sign to the left offers mute testimony to the shift
from Mexican to southwestern migrants in California agriculture. Notice that
the Hotchkiss Ranch has been able to expand production of cotton despite the
Depression (from 10,000 to 15,000 acres in cultivation and from 3,000 to 10,000
acres in cotton). The glowing description on the signs is a far cry from the actual
conditions under which most migrants lived and worked.

worked as a miner, laid tracks for the streetcar in Los Angeles, and worked on
road construction between Los Angeles and San Diego.
This pattern of varied labor was common among both Mexicans and Fili­
pinos. Although many workers called Los Angeles or some other city their
home, they moved seasonally to jobs they knew they could count on. "You
start out the y ear, January," one Filipino laborer recalled, "you'd find a place
and it was usually an asparagus camp.... From asparagus season, we would
migrate to Fairfield, to Suisin and there the men worked out in the orchards
picking fruits while the women and even children, as long as the y could stand
3 06 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

on their boxes, worked cutting fruits." Historian Devra Weber has argued
that these more regular patterns of migration became a source of stability
in a chaotic labor regime by providing a combination of jobs that allowed
families to make ends meet.
Now that we are aware of these patterns of agricultural labor,we can place
the Okies' arrival in context.In doing so,it becomes evident that not one but
two large migrations were going on during the 1930s. Over the decade, as
we have seen,as many as 400,000 southwesterners came to the state.During
that same period, however,anywhere from half a million to a million Mexi­
cans returned to Mexico from the United States. (Exact figures for migra­
tion in and out of Mexico are difficult to obtain.) With the coming of the
Depression and scarce employment,many local governments either encour­
aged or coerced Mexican laborers into leaving the country. Many laborers
who were forced out had been born in the United States and thus were legal
citizens. "My father left his best years of his life in this country because he
worked hard in the mines and in the fields," recalled one San Joaquin Val­
ley resident,"and when hard times came around,we were expendable,to be
thrown like cattle out of this country."
These odysseys were as wrenching as those of the Okies,and very similar.
Life was "muy dura," recalled Lillie Gasca-Cuellar-very hard.

Sufri6 uno mucho. Mucho trabajo. No tenfamos estufa. No tenfamos camas.

Dormfamos no mas con cart6nes, no tenfamos casa-y a veces en las calles
durmiendonos.

[We suffered a lot. Lots of work. We didn't have a stove. We didn't have beds.
We had only cartons to sleep on, we didn't have a house-and at times we
slept in the streets.]

By 1940,whites constituted 7 6 percent of the workforce in the San Joaquin

Valley, an area that formerly had been a stronghold of Mexican labor. Of
those white workers,half were southwestern migrants.
As we have seen,the Okie migration was unusual in that it consisted more
often of families than of single individuals. Even so, the newcomers in the
1930s lacked the extensive network of family and community connections
built up by Mexican families during the previous two decades.Those south­
westerners who already had family in California adapted best. But other
newcomers could not anticipate the harvest schedules of crops they had
never grown, so that they sometimes arrived at picking fields early, losing
precious time, or came too late, when there was no work to be had. Fur­
thermore,the picking style for California cotton proved different from that
of the plains.Jessie de la Cruz, an experienced Mexican picker, noticed that
some Texans in her field "weren't used to this kind of picking.... It had to
be clean,no leaves,you had to leave nothing but the stalk." The newcomers
picked forty-five pounds to her hundred. Such difficulties compounded the
problems faced by newcomers like the Joads.
In theory, southwestern migrants might have made common cause
with Mexican and Filipino laborers to strike for better wages and working
 Dust Buwl Odysse;y 307

California had both ladder crops-tree fruit that workers climbed to pick-and
st(X)p crops-those that required long hours of painful bending and squatting to
pick. Growers of stoop crops generally preferred Filipino and other Asian American
workers because those workers had conditioned themselves to the painful positions
involved. Such conditioning did not mean they did not suffer greatly from the
physical demands of the work.

conditions. As migrants poured into the San Joaquin Valley, established

local residents treated them with increasingly open hostility. The Grapes
of Wrath portrays the comments of a service station attendant at Needles,
California: "Them Okies got no sense and no feelings. They ain't hwnan.
A human being wouldn't live like they do. A hwnan being couldn't stand it
to be so dirty and so miserable. They ain't a hell of a lot better than goril­
las." Other journalists and investigators reported similar prejudices. "You
take some of these guys," complained a California grower, "and give them
the best land in the Garden of Eden and they'd starve to death."
But cultural prejudices made cooperation between ethnic groups difficult.
Okies often found California's ethnic and racial diversity threatening. Com­
pared to the southwest plains, California simply had too many "foreigners."
As one Okie put it, "the farmers ain't got no business hirin' them fer low
wages when we native white American citizens are starvin'." At an FSA labor
camp in Arvin, California, migrants from Texas objected when a Mexican
family moved in. "Remember the Alamo! Either us or them," they told the
camp manager. "Can't have both of us here."
The competition for jobs intensified resentments. Some Okies found it
degrading to pick for Italian and Japanese growers or to find work through
Hispanic labor contractors-crmtratistas. There were certain kinds of farm­
work the Okies could not or would not do. Vegetables like asparagus required
308 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

them "to squat and walk, like a Mexican," which most could not. Mexicans
and Asians did the more backbreaking work associated with ground crops
like vegetables and potatoes. "White men can't do the work as well as these
short men who can get down on their hands and knees, or work all day long
stooping over," commented a California newspaper editor in 1930, and his
sentiments were echoed by a Japanese farmer, who applied the same preju­
dice to the Filipino workers he hired. "The Fils do all the stoop labor. They
are small and work fast." As might be expected, such judgments were not
shared by the workers themselves. "Many people think that we don't suffer
from stoop labor, but we do," remarked one Filipino.
In the end, the oversupply of labor drove wages down, making life worse
for Okie, Mexican, Filipino, and Japanese laborers alike. The census shows
that with the influx of southwestern migrants, the income for all workers
fell. Even so, the Okies earned more than the minorities they displaced.
Once again the census provides key evidence. In 1940 southwesterner fami­
lies who arrived in the valley before 1935 had average annual incomes of
$1,070. Those who arrived between 1935 and 1940 averaged $650, while
other white Californians received $1,510. Those Mexican families who had
not returned to their homeland earned just $555 a year and usually found
even New Deal relief programs beyond their reach. California law barred
alien Mexicans from public work projects, and local rules also kept many
Mexicans, even those who were American citizens, from WPA jobs.
In short, the structure and dynamics of agricultural labor in California
were far more complex than The Grapes of Wrath could suggest within the
tale of a single family's tribulations. Why did Steinbeck ignore the darker
sides of that complexity? The answer is perhaps not so difficult to under­
stand. Instinctively, he viewed the Okies as victims, not victimizers. From his
perspective, the real tragedy of the farm crisis of the 1930s was the destruc­
tion of Jeffersonian agrarian ideals. Steinbeck wanted the government to
give the Joads more than a handout; he advocated a second revolution that
would recreate an America of small farmers rooted in the land. He failed to
acknowledge that the ideals he cherished too often applied only to white
Americans and, in any case, had become increasingly irrelevant to the kind
of industrial agriculture that was transforming America.
In the seven decades since the dust storms swept across the southwestern
plains, the United States has been transformed by a civil rights revolution. It
has been reminded, too, of its diversity, by the renewed tide of immigration
springing up in the wake of the Immigration Reform Act of 1964. Historians
have worked to give voice to that diversity. In doing so, they have drawn not
only on statistics but folk songs, photographs, anecdotes, and observations
from ordinary people like the Turners, the Garretsons, and Lillie Gasca­
Cuellar. Among this abundance of evidence, the impersonal numbers of the
census may have seemed, at first blush, the most lifeless of voices. But in the
aggregate, the mass of their ones and zeros provides the structure that gives
a collective portrait weight and balance. And with proper study, the tales
those numbers tell can prove to be nearly as gripping as those of a novel.
 Dust Bowl Odyssey 3 09

Additional Reading

Because the narrative in this chapter begins with "dust," interested read­
ers might well begin with Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern
Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979). For an idiosyncratic view, Worster
would direct readers to James Malin, The Grasslands ofNorth America (New
York, 1956).John Steinbeck actually began The Grapes of Wrath (New York,
1939) as a series of articles for the San Francisco News and published them
as Their Blood Is Strong (New York, 1938). A similar study that historians
find valuable is Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields (Boston, 1939).
On "Migrant Mother" we recommend Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster
Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York, 1939).
That book may be hard to find, but Lange and her work are the subject of
Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York, 1978).
Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (New York, 1996), is a recent
reprint with much of her work. The story of "Migrant Mother," The Grapes
of Wrath as both novel and movie, and other aspects of the Dust Bowl in
American cultural memory are wonderfully told and illustrated in Charles
J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence, KS,
1997). Many of Lange's photographs, including "Migrant Mother 6," are
available online through the Library of Congress at its American Memory
site: http://memory.loc.gov.
The work of two historians has contributed heavily to this essay. James
Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in Cali­
fornia (New York, 1989), not only conceptualizes the problem of collective
history, he also models the way in which quantitative analysis and anecdotal
narrative interact to produce history that is both informative and easy to
read. In that same spirit, Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California
Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley, 1994), has captured the
migrant farmworkers' experience with special attention to Mexicans. The
footnotes from these many sources inevitably lead back to the U.S. Bureau
of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970,
2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1975), which is supplemented annually. Internet
users can access the Census Bureau at http://www.census.gov.
CHAPTER I 3

The Decision to Drop the Bomb

President Harry Truman claimed he gave the order to drop the

atom bomb in order to end the war with Japan quickly. Many
historians wonder if that is the whole story.

Just before dawn on July 16, 1945, a few clouds hung over the still New
Mexico desert. To the anxious observers in the blockhouse, several large
towers on the horizon appeared as little more than spikes stuck in the sand.
Suddenly, from one of the towers a brilliant fireball erupted, searing the
air and instantly replacing the dawn's pastels with a blazing radiance. With
the radiance came heat-an incredible, scorching heat that rolled outward
in waves. Where seconds before the sand had stretched cool and level in
every direction, now it fused into glass pellets. The concussion from the
fireball completely vaporized the tower at its center, created a crater a quar­
ter of a mile wide, and obliterated another forty-ton steel tower one-half
mile away. Above the fireball an ominous cloud formed, shooting upward,
outward, then back upon itself to form the shape of a mushroom, expanding
until it had reached 8 miles in the air. The effects of the fireball continued
outward from its center: the light, followed by the waves of heat, and then
the deadening roar of the concussion, sharp enough to break a window more
than 125 miles away. Light, heat, concussion-but first and foremost, the
brilliance of the light. At the edge of the desert a blind woman was facing the
explosion. She saw the light.
In the blockhouse at Alamogordo, where scientists watched, feelings of
joy and relief were mixed with foreboding. The bomb had worked. Theory
had been turned into practice. And devastating as the explosion appeared,
the resulting fireball had not ignited the earth's atmosphere, as some scien­
tists had predicted. But the foreboding was impossible to shake. Humankind
now had in its hands unprecedented power to destroy.
General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atom bomb project, shared none of
the scientists' fears. Groves could barely contain his joy when he wired the news
to President Harry Truman, who was meeting allied leaders at Potsdam outside
the conquered city of Berlin. "The test was successful beyond the most optimis­
tic expectations of anyone," reported Groves. Buoyed by the message, Truman
returned to the conference a changed man. British Prime Minister Winston

310
 The Decisiun to [)rop 'the Bomb 311

At 081S hours August 6, 194S, the bomber Enola Gay and its flight crew received
weather clearance and proceeded toward Hiroshima. An hour later, flying at
328 miles per hour, it dropped its bomb directly over the city, from 31,000 feet. It
then turned and dove sharply in order to gain speed. The bomb detonated at about
2,000 feet above Hiroshima in order to increase the effective radius of its blast; the
resulting cloud, photographed by a nearby observation plane, reached 50,000 feet
into the air and was visible for 390 miles. The final statistic: approximately 100,000
people killed and thousands dying from radiation poisoning.

Churchill noticed the president's sudden self-confidence. "He stood up to

the Russians in a most decisive and emphatic manner," Churchill remarked.
"He told the Russians just where they got on and got off and generally bossed
the whole meeting." Since the British were partners on the bomb project,
Churchill understood why Truman suddenly seemed so confident.
312 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Less than three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, a second mushroom cloud
rose, this time above Hiroshima, Japan. That explosion destroyed an entire
city; it left almost 100,000 people dead and thousands more dying from radi­
ation poisoning. Three days later another bomb leveled the city of Nagasaki.
Only then did World War II come to an end, the bloodiest and costliest
war in history. Ever since, the world has lived with the stark prospect that in
anger or in error, some person, group, or government might again unleash
the horror of atomic war.
The New Mexico test of the first atom bomb marked the successful con­
clusion of the Manhattan Project, the code name for one of the largest sci­
entific and industrial efforts ever undertaken. Between 1941 and 1945 the
United States spent more than $2 billion to build three atom bombs. Twenty
years earlier that amount would have equaled the entire federal budget. The
project required some thirty-seven factories and laboratories in nineteen
states and Canada, employed more than 120,000 people, and monopolized
many of the nation's top scientists and engineers during a period when their
skills were considered essential to national survival. Leading universities, as
well as some of the nation's largest corporations-DuPont, Eastman Kodak,
and General Electric-devoted substantial resources to the undertaking.
The Manhattan Project marked the trend in modern industrial society
for physicists and other scientists to conduct their work within large organi­
zations. For much of the nineteenth century, scientists, like artists, worked
alone or in small groups, using relatively simple equipment. Thomas Edison,
however, led the way toward rationalized, business-oriented research and
development, establishing his own "scientific" factory at Menlo Park, New
Jersey, in 1876. Like a manufacturer, Edison subdivided research tasks among
inventors, engineers, and toolmakers. By the first decades of the twentieth
century, Westinghouse, DuPont, U.S. Rubber, and other major corporations
had set up their own industrial labs.
Then, too, World War I demonstrated that organized, well-funded sci­
ence could be vital to national security. During the war, scientists joined in
large research projects to develop new explosives, poison gases, optical glass
for lenses, airplane instruments, and submarine-detection devices. In less
than two years, physicists and
electrical engineers had doubled
World "War I demonstrated that
the advances of radio technology
over the previous ten years. The
organized, well-funded science could be
government, for the first time, vital to national securi-ty.
funded research on a large scale.
But scientists were as much committed to the notion of laissez-faire as any
conservative robber baron. They were suspicious of any "scheme in which
any small group of men, appointed as a branch of the government, attempt
to dominate and control the research of the country," as one scientist put it.
The end of the war halted government direction and financial sup­
port. Still, like most Americans, scientists shared in the prosperity of the
1920s. Economic boom meant increases in research budgets. Success
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 3 13

in the laboratory attracted contributions from private foundations and

wealthy individuals. American science began to produce both theoretical
and applied results that rivaled the quality of science in Europe.
The Depression of the 1930s forced researchers to tighten their belts
and lower their expectations. The government, though seldom an impor­
tant source of funding, drastically cut the budgets for its scientific bureaus.
Even when the New Deal created jobs for scientists, it did so primarily to
stimulate employment, not research. But by the late 1930s private founda­
tions had resumed earlier levels of support. One of their most prominent
beneficiaries was Ernest Lawrence, a physicist with a flair for showmanship
who had established himself as the most famous, most funded, and most
bureaucratically organized scientist in the United States. During the 1930s
Lawrence built what he called a cyclotron, a machine designed to accelerate
atomic particles in a focused beam in order to penetrate the nucleus's shell
and unravel its structure and dynamics. By 1939 his Radiation Lab at the
University of California at Berkeley was raising the unprecedented sum of
$1.5 million to build an enormous, 100-million-volt cyclotron.
The movement of science toward organization and bureaucracy reflected
similar forces at work elsewhere in American society. As Lawrence expanded
his laboratory at Berkeley, the New Deal was establishing new regulatory
agencies, social welfare programs, and other government organizations that
reached into many areas of daily life. Furthermore, much that the New Deal
instituted through government and politics in the 1930s, large corporations
had accomplished in the preceding era. Centralized slaughterhouses, with
their elaborate distribution system involving railroads, refrigerated ware­
houses, and trucks, replaced the local butcher as the source of meat for many
American tables. What Armour and Swift did for meatpacking, Heinz did for
the pickle, Henry Ford for the automobile, and other corporations for the
multitude of food, clothing, and goods used in American homes and indus­
try. To understand the nature of the modern era, to grasp an undertaking as
vast as the making of an atomic bomb or a decision as complex as how to use
it, historians must understand how large organizations work.

MODELS OF DECISION MAKING

"Truman dropped the atom bomb in order to win the war as quickly as pos­
sible." Historians routinely use such convenient shorthand in their historical
narratives. Yet physically, of course, Truman was nowhere near Japan or the
bomb when it was dropped. He was halfway around the world, returning from
the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Churchill. The actual sequence of
events was rather more complicated. President Truman did give an order.
It passed through the Pentagon to an airbase on the island of Tinian in the
western Pacific. The base commander ordered a specially trained crew to arm
an American airplane with a single atom bomb, designed and built by scien­
tists and technicians under the authority of the War Department. The pilot
314 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

of the plane then followed an order, conveyed through the military chain of
command, to proceed to a target in Japan, selected by the secretary of war in
consultation with his military advisers, in order to destroy a Japanese city and
thereby hasten the end of the war.
The difference in meaning between "Truman dropped the atom bomb"
and what actually happened encapsulates the dilemma of a historian trying
to portray the workings of a systematized, bureaucratic modern society. The
first explanation is coherent, clear,
and human. It accords with Harry Harry Truman� own well­
Truman's own well-known maxim
known maxim "T he buck
"The buck stops here"-implying that
stops here "-implied that
the important, truly difficult decisions
were his and his alone. The second the important, truly difficult
explanation is cumbersome and con­ decisions were his and his alone.
fusing, but more comprehensive and
descriptive. It reflects the fact that the president stood at the tip of a pyramid
of advisers, agencies, bureaus, offices, and committees, all going about their
own business. And such organizations create their own characteristic ways
of gathering information, planning, working, and acting. To a large extent,
what Truman decided or did not decide depended on what he learned from
those organizations. To that extent also, the shorthand "Truman dropped
the atom bomb" conceals as much as it reveals.
To better analyze the workings of organizations, historians have bor­
rowed a technique from the social sciences. They work with interpretive
models. For many people, the term model might bring to mind an object like
a small plastic airplane or an electric train. For social scientists, a model, not
unlike the small plane, reduces the scale of reality and increases the research­
ers' capacity to describe the characteristics of what they observe. Models
can be applied to systems as basic as individual behavior or as grand as the
world's climate. If the average daily temperature goes up, will we have more
or less rain? If the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases,
will temperatures rise? A computer model of weather patterns allows meteo­
rologists to test the relationship between such variables in the climate. Even
so, the number of variables is so great that meteorologists are forced to speak
of probabilities, not certainties. While their model provides insights into
several components of a weather system, it inevitably simplifies as well. In
that sense models, too, have limits.
The phrase "Truman dropped the atom bomb" typifies the application of
what some social scientists have called a "rational actor" model. This inter­
pretive framework may be what historians most often adopt without even
thinking about models. Rational actor theory treats the actions of govern­
ments and large organizations as the acts of individuals. Further, it assumes
that the individual actor, like Adam Smith's capitalist, behaves rationally in
that he or she uses the most efficient means to pursue ends that are in his or
her self-interest. When forced to choose among a range of possible actions,
government leaders will select the option that achieves the best result at the
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 315

lowest cost. One does not use a bat to swat a fly, nor would a government go
to war to collect a small debt, unless war served some larger purpose.
The appeal of this model lies in its predictive powers. Often enough, gov­
ernments do not make clear why they act. On other occasions, they announce
their goals but keep their strategies for achieving them secret. By applying
standards of rational behavior, an analyst can make inductive leaps about a
government's unclear goals or hidden actions. If we know that a govern­
ment has suddenly ordered highly mobile assault troops to the borders of
its nation but we lack evidence about its goals, we might still conclude that a
rational actor would not use mobile assault troops merely to defend borders:
an invasion is planned. The process works in reverse as well. If analysts know
what goals a nation has at hand, they can guess with some confidence what
its leaders might do in a situation, given their resources.
Franklin Roosevelt's decision to launch the Manhattan Project presents
historians with an example of how rational actor analysis can help reveal
motivations and goals. Roosevelt was not an easy person to read-either for
his advisers or for historians. Often enough, his orders to different people
seemed contradictory. Or he would encourage competing bureaucracies to
implement the same policy. In setting in motion the bomb project, Roosevelt
left little evidence about why he made his decision. But the rational actor
model suggests that Roosevelt recognized the military potential of nuclear
fission; calculated that the United States had the financial, industrial, and sci­
entific resources needed; and concluded that the nation's security demanded
full-scale research and development.
The available evidence does support that conclusion. The Manhattan
Project owed its beginnings to several physicists, primarily refugees from
fascist Germany and Italy who feared that recent atomic research would
allow the Nazis to develop a weapon of unparalleled destructive force. In
March 1939 Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had fled
from Mussolini's Italy, paid his own way to Washington to warn the mili­
tary. Fermi himself had been on the verge of discovering fission reactions in
1934 but had not then recognized the meaning of his results. If he had, the
fascist powers might have applied his results to military use. Although Fermi
had become an American citizen and a faculty member at Columbia Univer­
sity, navy technical experts ignored his warning. Other refugee physicists,
led by Leo Szilard, joined the campaign. Szilard persuaded Albert Einstein,
the world's most admired scientist, to lend his name to a letter explaining
their concern to President Roosevelt. Alexander Sachs, an economic adviser
to the president, acted as their emissary. After Roosevelt read the letter and
heard Sachs out, he remarked, "Alex, what you are after is to see they don't
blow us up."
The president took immediate action, but he did not yet set in motion a
massive research project. That step would have been irrational, for as Sachs
had made clear, the scientists had not yet found a way to harness the power
of fission for war. Instead, Roosevelt merely created a Uranium Committee
to promote American nuclear research. The project got under way slowly,
316 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

for the committee requested only $6,000 for its first year of operations.
Other, more promising experimental efforts competed for funds that were
particularly scarce since the United States was not yet at war.
In England, however, two German emigres developed an understanding
of how a "superbomb" might work. Scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolph Pei­
erls determined that the fast neutrons needed to set off an explosive chain
reaction could be produced with either plutonium or uranium 235, a fission­
able isotope that could be separated from uranium 2 3 8. They also suggested
ways to separate uranium 2 3 5 from uranium 2 3 8. The amount of fissionable
material needed would be small enough to fit into a bomb that existing air­
craft could carry. Such a bomb, Frisch and Peierls calculated, could probably
be built within two years. What was more frightening, German physicists
were known to have made similar discoveries. Allied scientists feared the
Germans might be as much as two years ahead in the race to build a bomb.
When the British passed this information along to the American adminis­
trators supervising war research, the head of the National Defense Research
Committee (NDRC), Vannevar Bush, immediately brought the news to
Roosevelt in June 1941. "If such an explosive were made," Bush told the
president, "it would be thousands of times more powerful than existing
explosives, and its use might be determining." The British research had
given the rational actor-in this case President Roosevelt-cause to commit
the United States to a larger project. To accelerate the research effort, Roos­
evelt replaced the ineffective Uranium Committee with a group called S-1.
The membership of the committee reflected the new priority of the bomb
project. It included Bush, now head of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development; his successor at NDRC,James Conant (the president of Har­
vard University); Vice President Henry Wallace; Secretary of War Henry
Stimson; and Chief of Staff General George Marshall. Bush and Conant
assumed primary responsibility for overseeing the project and keeping the
president informed. In September 1942 General Leslie Groves, who super­
vised construction of the Pentagon, assumed command over the construc­
tion and operation of the rapidly expanding facilities that were named the
Manhattan Project.
For three years, American, British, and emigre scientists raced against time
and what they feared was an insurmountable German lead. At first, research
focused on the work of scientists at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory
(another code name). There, on a squash court under the old University of
Chicago football stadium, Fermi and his associates achieved the first self­
sustaining chain reaction. The next goal was the separation of enough pure
uranium 2 3 5 or sufficient plutonium to build a bomb. That goal required
the construction of huge plants-an expense that now seemed rational, in
light of the work at Chicago. Conant authorized Groves to begin building
facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.
Actual design of the bomb took place at a remote mountain site near
Los Alamos, New Mexico. Los Alamos was the choice of physicist Robert
Oppenheimer. As director of the design laboratory, Oppenheimer sought a
 The Decisi<m w Drop the B<Ymb 317

J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the construction, completion, and testing of the

first atomic bomb at a remote desert site near Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was an
intense, introspective man and a chain-smoker early in his career; he confessed he
found it nearly impossible to think without a cigarette in his hand. The burden of
the Manhattan Project took its toll on him: the chain-smoking commenced again,
and his weight, normally only 130 pounds, dropped to 116.

place to isolate the most outstanding collection of experimental and theoreti­

cal physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers ever assembled. Free
from the intrusions of the press and inquisitive colleagues, world-renowned
scientists rubbed elbows with brilliant, eager young graduate students, all
applying the abstract theories of physics to the question of how to produce
an atomic weapon.
By the summer of 1944 the race with the Nazis had ended. Spies dis­
covered that German physicists had long since given up hope of building a
bomb. As Allied forces marched into Berlin in April 1945, scientists knew
that peace would come to Europe before the bomb was ready. The war
againstJapan, however, had grown more ferocious. Fearing heavy American
casualties during an invasion of Japan's home islands, President Roosevelt
318 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

had asked Stalin to enter the Pacific war. Yet as the tide of battle began to
favor the Allies, the president became more reluctant to draw the Soviets
into Japan. If the bomb could win the war for the United States, all the sacri­
fices of time, personnel, and materials would not have been in vain. Oppen­
heimer, Groves, and the Manhattan Project scientists redoubled their efforts
to produce a working bomb.
Thus the rational actor model explains adequately the progression of
events that brought about the bomb' s development: (1) physicists saw the
potential of nuclear fission and warned the president; (2) Roosevelt ordered
a speedup in research; (3) scientific breakthroughs led to greater certainty
of eventual success, causing the president to give bomb research top prior­
ity ; (4) the race with Germany, and then Japanese resistance in the Far East,
encouraged scientists to push toward success.
Although this outline of key decisions proceeds logically enough, there are
troubling features to it, suggesting limits to the rational actor model. Cer­
tainly Roosevelt could be viewed as the rational actor. But we have already
seen that a host of committees and subgroups were involved in the process.
And the model becomes murkier
when we seek answers to a number
Who did the United States really
of controversial questions surround­
ing the decision actually to use the
want to shock with its atomic bomb?
bomb. Did the military situation in Japan or the Soviet Union?
the summer of 1945 justify launch­
ing the attacks without warning Japan? Could a nonmilitary demonstration
of the bomb's power have persuaded the Japanese to surrender without im­
mense loss of life? Why drop a second bomb on Japan so soon after the first?
And finally, who did the United States really want to shock with its atomic
might-Japan or the Soviet Union?
To be sure, rational actor analysis provides answers to these questions.
The problem is, it provides too many. Historians have offered contradic­
tory answers to the way a rational actor might have been expected to behave
under the circumstances. To begin with, what was the most crucial problem
to be solved by a rational actor in that summer of 1945? On the one hand,
convincing Japan to surrender was the primary goal of the war-something
the use of atomic bombs would be expected to hasten. On the other hand,
military and diplomatic planners had already begun to focus on the transition
from war to peace. Increasingly, they worried about the postwar conduct of
the Soviet Union. Following the surrenders of Italy and Germany, the Rus­
sians had begun consolidating control over Eastern Europe. Many British
and American officials feared that Stalin saw victory as a way to extend the
global reach of communism. The larger the role assumed by the Soviets in
the Pacific, the greater their opportunity for expansion there too.
But what if the bomb were used to end the war before Stalin's troops could
make any headway in the Far East? Wasn't it likely Stalin would become
more cooperative once he saw the awesome power of such a weapon? That
"rational" line of reasoning raises an unsettling possibility. Did the United
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 3 19

States drop the bomb primarily to send a warning to the Soviet Union? So
concluded historian Gar Alperovitz, who argued that after Franklin Roo­
sevelt's untimely death in April 1945, PresidentTruman was more concerned
with containing the Soviet Union than with defeatingJapan.
Alperovitz came to that conclusion by examining the information available
to Truman and his advisers in the summer of 1945. That data, he argued,
should have convincedTruman (or any rational actor) that the United States
had no compelling military reason to drop atomic bombs on Japan. The
American navy had already established a tight blockade around Japan, cut­
ting off delivery of raw materials and threatening theJapanese economy with
widespread starvation. Allied land-based bombers had leveled whole sections
ofTokyo without opposition fromJapanese fighters. ByJuly 1945Japan was
ready to consider capitulation, except that in 1943 Roosevelt had laid down
uncompromising terms of "unconditional surrender." The Japanese feared
that the United States would insist that their emperor leave his throne, a
humiliation they wished at all costs to avoid.Their only hope was to nego­
tiate terms of surrender, using the Russians as intermediaries, to obtain a
guarantee that the institution of the emperor would be preserved.
Truman knew that the Japanese had made overtures to the Soviet Union.
"Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace," theJapanese foreign
minister had cabled his emissary in Moscow, in a coded message intercepted
by American intelligence. Still,Truman refused to deviate from Roosevelt's
policy of unconditional surrender. At the Potsdam Conference, Allied lead­
ers issued a vaguely worded proclamation warning the Japanese that they
faced "prompt and utter destruction" if they fought on. Nowhere did the
proclamation mention the existence of a new superbomb. Nor did it offer
hope that the Allies might permit theJapanese to keep their emperor. When
the Japanese ignored the warning, the Americans concluded that Japan had
resolved to continue fanatic resistance.
In fact, the emperor himself had taken unprecedented, though cautious, steps
to undermine the war party. He had decided that the military extremists must
accept surrender on Allied terms. But the bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6,
followed two days later by a Russian declaration of war, threw theJapanese gov­
ernment into confusion. Before it could digest this double shock, Nagasaki was
leveled on August 9. Even then, theJapanese surrendered only when the United
States made an implicit commitment to retain the emperor. DespiteTruman's
insistence on an "unconditional" surrender, in the end it had been conditional.
Alperovitz's conclusion is sobering. If ending the war had beenTruman's
only goal, the rational response would have been to giveJapan the extra few
days or weeks to negotiate a surrender. There would have been no need to
drop the bomb. But of course it was dropped. Therefore (so the logic goes)
the president's primary goal must have been to intimidate the Soviets. This
possibility was one that Alperovitz understandably condemned, for it would
have meant that Truman had wantonly incinerated hundreds of thousands
of Japanese for reasons that had little to do with the war itself. Further­
more, ifTruman had hoped to intimidate the Russians into cooperating, he
320 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

seriously erred-for the Soviet Union became, if anything, more intractable

after Japan's surrender. Failure to achieve a nuclear arms control agreement
with Stalin while the United States and Britain had a monopoly on atomic
weapons led to a postwar arms race. Possession of the atom bomb resulted
finally in a decrease in American security and a loss of moral stature. Those
consequences are not the desired results of rational decision making.
Alperovitz's reconstruction of Truman's choices placed most emphasis on
the diplomatic effects of dropping the bomb. But were these the factors that
weighed most heavily on the minds of Truman and his advisers? Other his­
torians have placed more emphasis on the military circumstances behind the
development of the bomb-not only in 1945 but in the years preceding it.
In doing so, they have constructed an alternate set of motivations that might
have influenced a rational actor.
Franklin Roosevelt was the first president who had to consider whether the
bomb would actually be used. And merely by approving the massive effort to
build a weapon, there was an implicit assumption on the president's part that
it would be used. "At no time," recalled former Secretary of War Stimson,
"did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible
member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the
war." Robert Oppenheimer, whose leadership at Los Alamos played a criti­
cal role in the success of the project, confirmed Stimson's point about the
bombs: "we always assumed if they were needed, they would be used."
In fact, Roosevelt was proceeding a bit more cautiously. He discussed
the delicate subject with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill when
the two men met at Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park in September 1944.
At the end of their private interview, with only the two of them present,
they signed a memorandum summarizing their attitudes. Both men agreed
that the bomb would be kept a secret from the Russians, an action that made
it clear (as Alperovitz contended) that the leaders recognized how valuable
a lever the weapon might be in postwar negotiations. As for the war itself,
Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the bomb might be used against Japan
after "mature consideration," while warning the Japanese "that this bom­
bardment will be repeated until they surrender."
If Roosevelt had lived, conceivably he might have proved more flexible
than Truman. But if he had any serious doubts about using the bomb, they
died with him. None of his military and diplomatic advisers were aware of the
Hyde Park memorandum. After Roosevelt's death, responsibility for atomic
policy shifted largely to Secretary of War Stimson, the cabinet officer in
charge of the Manhattan Project. The new president, Truman, knew nothing
about the bomb or, for that matter, most other critical diplomatic and military
matters. Roosevelt had seldom consulted the vice president or even met with
him. Once, while acting as chair of a Senate committee, Truman had stum­
bled onto information about the vast sums being spent on some unknown
project, only to be persuaded by Stimson that secrecy should prevail. As the
war approached its end and the new president faced a host of critical deci­
sions, Stimson cautiously introduced him to the bomb. "I mentioned it to you
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 3 21

shortly after you took office," the secretary prompted him on April 23, 1945,
"but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under.
It, however, has such bearing on our present foreign relations . .. I think you
ought to know about it without further delay."
To present his case, Stimson prepared a memorandum setting out his two
most pressing concerns. He wanted Truman to recognize the monumental
importance of the bomb for postwar relations, particularly with the Soviet
Union. And he wanted to emphasize the bomb's capacity to shorten the war.
Stimson displayed no qualms about using it against Japan and considered no
steps to avert a postwar nuclear arms race.But the two men did agree that Stim­
son should form a committee to formulate further policy options.It would seem
that the rational actor was at work: if Truman wanted to weigh all his options,
the committee would provide him with a full range from which to choose.
The Interim Committee, as the group was known, met three times. It also
created a scientific panel that included Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and
Arthur Compton (head of the Chicago lab) to advise the committee. During
its meetings, it scarcely touched the question of whether to drop the bomb on
Japan."It seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used,"
Arthur Compton recalled. "It was regarding only the details of strategy and
tactics that differing views were expressed." When those issues were debated,
some members briefly considered a nonmilitary demonstration in place of a
surprise military attack. They asked Oppenheimer how such a demonstration
might be prepared.Since the bomb had yet to be tested, Oppenheimer could
only estimate its power.He replied that he could not conceive of any demon­
stration that would have the impact of an attack on a real target of factories
and buildings. Furthermore, the committee had to consider what might hap­
pen ifJapanese representatives were taken to a test site and the mighty atomic
"demonstration" fizzled. And if the Japanese were given advance warning
about a superbomb, wouldn't that allow them to prepare their defenses or
move American prisoners of war to likely bombing targets?
For all those reasons the Interim Committee decided against giving any
advance warning. In addition, it made several assumptions about Japan that
predetermined its recommendations to the president. First, committee
members considered the military leadership of Japan so fanatic that only a
profound shock such as an atomic attack would persuade them to surrender.
Kamikaze attacks byJapanese pilots, as well as other resistance, continued to
claim a heavy toll in American lives. General Douglas MacArthur, who had
led the Western Pacific campaign againstJapan, discounted the effectiveness
of either a naval blockade of the home islands or continued air raids with
conventional bombs. Only a full-scale invasion, MacArthur argued, would
compel surrender. The army continued to organize an invasion for Novem­
ber 1, anticipating as many as a half million American casualties.*

* This casualty figure has become quite controversial. Historian Martin Sherwin has discovered that
a number of prominent military figures offered a much lower estimate, which would have made an
invasion a more reasonable option.
322 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

In any case, by 1945 committee members had become somewhat hard­

ened to the idea of killing enemy soldiers or civilians. Conventional fire­
bombing had already proved as horrifying as the atom bomb promised to
be. In one incendiary raid, American bombers leveled one-quarter of Tokyo,
left 83,000 people dead, and wounded another 40,000. Having lived with the
fear that the Germans might use an atom bomb against the United States,
committee members had ample reason to see it as a potential weapon against
the Japanese. Since it promised to save American lives, the committee sensed
that the public would want,
even demand, combat use. And
By 194 5 committee members had
finally, though the members
become somewhat hardened to the idea
were far from agreement, the
committee decided that a com­ of killing enemy soldiers or civilians.
bat demonstration would facili-
tate negotiations with the Russians. From those assumptions they reached
three conclusions: (1) the bomb should be used as quickly as possible against
Japan; (2) to maximize the shock value, the target should be a war plant sur­
rounded by workers' homes; (3) no warning should be given. When Stimson
communicated those views to Truman, he included a recommendation that
both bombs scheduled for completion by August should be dropped in sepa­
rate raids, in order to maximize the shock and convince Japanese leaders that
further resistance meant certain destruction.
In only one small but vital way did Truman deviate from the committee's
determination of how and why to use the bomb. A group of scientists at the
Chicago laboratory, led by Leo Szilard, had become persuaded that combat
use of the bomb without warning would lead to a postwar arms race between
the Soviets and the Americans. They urged Truman and his advisers to tell
the Russians about the bomb and to plan a demonstration before using it in
combat. In a concession to Szilard and his colleagues, the Interim Commit­
tee recommended that Truman disclose the bomb to Stalin in order to help
gain his cooperation after the war. At Potsdam, Truman chose not to discuss
the bomb or atomic energy. But he did make an oblique reference to Stalin
"that we had a weapon of unusual destructive force." Stalin was equally cryp­
tic in his reply. "He was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use
of it' against the Japanese," the president recalled. And so Truman acted.
By retracing the series of decisions made over the entire year preceding the
attack on Hiroshima, it becomes clearer that, for Truman, military consider­
ations about how to end the war with a minimum number of casualties remained
paramount. Resolution of Soviet-American differences was a secondary goal,
though rapidly becoming the administration's chief concern. Using the bomb
would also forestall any criticism in Congress for having spent $2 billion on
the secret Manhattan Project. Thus the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
appeared to be the optimum way to reach the administration's primary objective,
with the additional virtue of promoting secondary goals as well. When applied
at the level of presidential decision making, rational actor analysis suggests that
the decision to drop the bomb was consistent with perceived American goals.
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 323

A MODEL OF ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS

Despite those results, the rational actor model exhibits definite limita­
tions. It leads us to focus attention on the policy-making debates of key
actors like Roosevelt and Truman, or even on scientists like Szilard and
Oppenheimer. But in truth, our narrative of events has involved numerous
committees far from the top of the organizational pyramid: the Uranium
Committee, S-1, the National Defense Research Council, and the Interim
Committee. Roosevelt and Truman relied on the recommendations of
those groups in making decisions. Should their participation make any dif­
ference to our explanations?
Imagine, for a moment, the government as a kind of giant clock. Rational
actor analysis would define the telling of time as the visible movements of
the hands controlled by a closed box. Inside are the gears, springs, and levers
that move the clock's hands: the bureaucracy supporting decision makers at
the top. In the rational actor model, these gears are seen as neutral cogs in
the machine, passing along the energy (or in government, the information)
that allows the hands to do their highly visible work. But suppose we look
at the decision-making process using a model that focuses on the organi­
zational processes themselves. Is there something about their structure or
behavior that influences the outcome of decisions made by supposedly ratio­
nal actors?
Of course, the actions of bureaucracies and agencies are usually less regi­
mented than the movements of a clock. Often enough, the subgroups that
make up a government end up working at cross-purposes or pursuing conflict­
ing objectives. While the Surgeon General's office has warned that cigarette
smoking is "hazardous to your health," the Department of Agriculture has
produced films on the virtues of American tobacco. Perhaps, then, it would
be better to envision not a clock but a football team. If we observe a game
from the stands, the players can be seen moving in coordinated patterns, in
an effort to control the movement of the ball. Rational actor analysis suggests
that the coach, or another centralized decision maker like the quarterback,
has selected the strategies best suited to winning the game. That larger strat­
egy, in turn, determines the plays that the offense and defense use.
After closer observation, we begin to sense that the play is not as centrally
coordinated as we anticipated. Different groups of players move in patterns
determined by their positions as well as by the team strategy. We come to
understand that the team is made up of subgroups that execute regularly
assigned tasks. Linemen block; ends run pass patterns. On each down, the
players do not try to think anew of the best imaginable play. Rather, they
repeat actions they have been trained to perform. A halfback will gener­
ally advance the ball by running and leave the passing to the quarterback.
On some plays, we observe that a few players' actions seem inappropriate.
A halfback runs when he should be blocking. Whereas the rational actor
model might interpret such a move as a purposeful attempt to deceive the
opposing team, a model focusing on organizational processes might recognize
324 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

it as a breakdown of coordination among subgroups. What one model treats

as planned, the other treats as a mistake.
Thus the organizational process model leads the historian to treat gov­
ernment behavior not as centralized acts and choices, but as the actions of
bureaucracies functioning in relatively predictable patterns. Organizations
begin by breaking problems into
parts, which are assigned to the
SOPs allow organizations to
appropriate subgroups to solve.
The subgroups do not have to
coordinate the independent activities of
understand the larger problem, many groups and individuals.
only the piece assigned to each
of them. They follow what the military refers to as SOP-standard operat­
ing procedure. If the quarterback decides on a sweep to the right, the line­
man's SOP is to block left; on a sweep to the left, he blocks right; for a pass,
straight ahead. SOPs allow organizations to coordinate the independent
activities of many groups and individuals.
While SOPs make coordination possible, they also limit the actions of
organizations. The more specialized a subgroup, the fewer tasks it is able to
perform. Its training is more narrowly focused, its equipment is more spe­
cialized, and the information available to it is more limited. All those factors
make it difficult for the group to deviate from regular routines. The weather
bureau, for example, would find it impossible to apply its computer programs
and specialized knowledge to predicting changes in the economy rather than
the weather. Furthermore, the rational actor is presumed to weigh all avail­
able choices to select the best one, but in the real lives of organizations,
SOPs determine the range and pattern of choices that are considered. Spe­
cialized groups are generally content to choose standardized and previously
determined policies rather than searching for new or improved ones.
Since organizations are generally as much concerned with avoiding failure
as with gambling on success, they also tend to be more conservative. Although
the rational actor might weigh the potential benefits against possible conse­
quences and then make a bold new departure, organizations tend to change
in small, incremental steps. Corporations, for example, like to test-market a
product before investing in expensive new plants, distribution networks, and
advertising. And we have already seen that the American government moved
relatively slowly in producing an atomic bomb. In authorizing the quest for a
bomb, Roosevelt was ordering the government to do something it had never
done before: conduct nuclear research. He soon discovered that the military
and scientific bureaus could not readily execute such an unprecedented deci­
sion. They lacked the scientific personnel, equipment, and research routines
that made the Manhattan Project possible. In the end, Roosevelt and project
managers such as Groves, Conant, Bush, and Oppenheimer had to create
new organizations and routines.
By treating the decision to drop the bomb not as a single act but as the out­
come of many organizational routines, historians can see more clearly why
progress on the bomb came slowly. In fact, the project could not have gotten
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 32 5

under way in the first place if emigre scientists had not broken through the
bureaucratic chain of command. When Fermi first approached navy offi­
cials, none of them could even comprehend the concept of nuclear power.
Only by writing the president directly did scientists attract the support they
needed. To get the project under way, Roosevelt was forced to create an ad
hoc committee to investigate the military potential of nuclear fission. His
decision to appoint Lyman Briggs, a government physicist, as head of the
Uranium Committee may have delayed the project by at least a year. As the
director of the Bureau of Standards, Briggs knew little about nuclear physics.
He was by temperament "slow, conservative, methodical"-ideal bureau­
cratic qualities totally unsuited to the bold departure Roosevelt sought. Not
until the president created the National Defense Research Committee did
nuclear physics gain adequate support.
In other areas, organizational behavior resulted in delays. President Roos­
evelt had established two incompatible priorities for NDRC head Vannevar
Bush: speed and security. The scientists felt speed should come before secu­
rity; military administrators opted for security over speed. Military SOP had
well-established ways to safeguard classified material. Officers were required
to operate strictly within the chain of command and were provided informa­
tion only on a "need-to-know" basis. Thus each soldier performed only a
portion of a task without knowledge of the larger mission and without talk­
ing with anyone beyond his or her immediate circle. In that way, informa­
tion was "compartmentalized"-securely protected so that only a few people
at the top of the chain of command saw the entire picture.
To maximize security, Groves proposed placing the laboratory at Los
Alamos under military control. All scientists would don uniforms and receive
ranks based on their importance. As a group, however, scientists were among
the least likely candidates for military regimentation. Their dress was more
informal than most working professionals (sloppy might have been the adjec­
tive that jumped to the military mind). In their laboratories, they operated
with a great deal of autonomy to pursue research as they saw fit. Oppen­
heimer could not recruit many scientists to come to Los Alamos until he
assured them the project would not be militarized.
Compartmentalization, also promoted by Groves, seriously inhibited
research. Physicists insisted that their work required access to all relevant
information. They thought best when they understood the wider implica­
tions of their work. Groves disdained their habit of engaging in creative,
freewheeling discussions that regularly drifted far afield of the topic at hand.
Scientists should stick to their jobs and receive information only on a need­
to-know basis. "Just as outfielders should not think about the manager's job
of changing pitchers," Groves said to justify his system, "each scientist had
to be made to do his own work." While compartmentalization promoted
security, it denied researchers vital information from other areas of the
project. Some scientists, like Szilard, simply violated security procedures
whenever they chose to. Oppenheimer eased the problem at Los Alamos
by conducting seminars during which his staff could exchange ideas and
326 An'ER THE FACT: THE ART OF HlSTORICAL DETECTION

In 1942 General Leslie Groves was placed in charge of the construction and
operation of the Manhattan Project.He got the job in part because he was a good
organizer, having supervised the construction of the Pentagon, still unfinished
in this 1942 photo. The building became the largest office facility in the world,
containing 16 miles of corridors, 600,000 square feet of office space, and a capacity
to house 32,000 workers. As historian Warren Susman recognized, it also became
a symbol of its era: "For the age it climaxed indeed the triumph of order, science,
reason ....And yet, for the age being born it was the home of the atom bomb and a
frightening bureaucratic structure, the beginning of a brave new world of anxiety."

information. But information never flowed freely among the many research
and production sites.
Security procedures indicate, too, that long before the war ended, many
policy makers saw the Soviet Union as their chief enemy. Few precautions
were designed against Japanese or even German agents. Military intelli­
gence concentrated its counterespionage against Soviet and communist spies.
Known communists or scientists with conunu.nist associations were kept
under constant surveillance. Had intelligence officers prevailed, they would
have barred Oppenheimer from the project because of his previous involve­
ment with communist-front organizations. To his credit, Groves overruled
the nearsighted sleuths in anny intelligence and saved the project's most
valuable member. In the meantime, security precautions against a wartime
ally continued to work to the advantage of the Nazis by delaying the project.
The military was not solely responsible for project bottlenecks. The pro­
cedures of organized science caused delays as well. Scientists recruited from
private industry did not share their academic colleagues' preoccupation with
speed. Work in industry had conditioned them to move cautiously, with an
eye toward efficiency, permanence, and low risk. Academic scientists felt
such industrial values "led to a considerable retardation of the program."
But the traditions of academic science also created problems. The bulk of
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 32 7

research money had most often been directed to the celebrities in each field.
Ernest Lawrence's reputation made him a magnet for grants and contribu­
tions. Manhattan Project administrators automatically turned to him as they
sought methods to refine the pure uranium 2 3 5 needed for the bomb. Much
of the money spent at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went into Lawrence's electro­
magnetic process based on the Berkeley cyclotron.
In the end, Lawrence's program proved to be a conspicuous failure. By 1944
Oppenheimer had the design for a uranium bomb but scarcely any uranium
2 3 5. In desperation he looked toward a process of gas diffusion developed
four years earlier by Harold Urey and a young, relatively unknown physicist
named John Dunning. Lawrence had been so persuaded of the superiority
of his own method that Groves gave it priority over the process developed
by Urey and Dunning. And compartmentalization prevented other physicists
from learning more about gas diffusion. As Dunning recalled, "compartmen­
talization and security kept news of our program from filtering in to Ernest
and his Laboratory [the Radiation Lab at Berkeley]." Physicists soon acknowl­
edged that electromagnetic separation was obsolete, but in the meantime, the
completion of the uranium bomb, "Little Boy," was delayed until July 1945.

A MODEL OF BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS

Clearly, bureaucratic structures and SOPs played major roles in determining
how the bomb was developed. Yet the example of an energetic and forceful
Vannevar Bush makes clear that within that organizational framework, not
all bureaucrats were created equal. Powerful individuals or groups can often
override the standard procedures of organizations as well as the carefully
thought-out choices of rational actors. It makes sense, then, for historians to
be alert to decisions shaped by the politics within government institutions.
If we return to our vantage point in the football stadium, we see lineback­
ers blocking and receivers going short or long-all SOPs being executed
as parts of a complex organization. The team's coach-the rational actor­
remains prominent, pacing the side­
lines, deploying forces. But we notice The play finally chosen may
now that often an assistant sends in a
not reflect rational choice, hut
play, or the quarterback makes a deci­
sion at the line of scrimmage. The
bargaining and compromise among
field has not just one decision maker, the players and the coach.
but many. And the play finally chosen
may not reflect rational choice, but bargaining and compromise among the
players and the coach. Although final authority may rest with the coach or
the quarterback, other players, such as a star halfback, gain influence and
prestige from the skill with which they play their positions.
A historian applying those insights, in what might be called a model of
bureaucratic politics, recognizes that a person's official position as defined
by the organization does not alone determine his or her bargaining power.
According to an organizational flowchart, the most influential members of the
328 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

executive branch, after the president, would be the secretaries of state, defense
(war and navy), and treasury. Yet American history abounds with examples in
which power has moved outside normal bureaucratic channels. Sometimes a
political actor, through astute jockeying, may convert a relatively less influential
office into an important command post, as Henry Kissinger did when he was
Richard Nixon's national security adviser. Kissinger, through forceful advo­
cacy, shaped foreign policy far more than Secretary of State William Rogers.
Colonel Edward M. House, the most influential adviser to Woodrow Wilson,
held no formal position at all. House achieved his power by maintaining a low
profile and offering the president seemingly objective counsel. For Attorney
General Robert Kennedy, family ties and political savvy, not his office, made
him a powerful figure in his brother's administration.
In the case of the atom bomb, the lines of political influence were shifted
by President Roosevelt's untimely death. When Harry Truman assumed the
presidency, all the old institutional and informal arrangements of decision
making had to be readjusted. Truman had had little access to the Roosevelt
administration's information and decision-making channels. Ignorance of
Roosevelt's policies forced Truman to rely far more heavily on a wider circle
of advisers. Stimson, for one, suddenly found that for several months the
need to initiate the president into the secrets of S-1 or the Manhattan Proj­
ect greatly enhanced his influence.
Thus during the same months that Truman was trying to set up his own
routines for decision making, individuals within various bureaucracies were
jockeying for influence within the new order. And amid all this organiza­
tional turmoil, key decisions about the bomb had to be made-decisions that
were neither clear-cut nor easy. Would a Soviet entry into the war force
Japan to surrender? Would conventional bombing raids and a blockade
prove sufficient to end the war? Did Japan's peace initiatives indicate victory
was at hand? Would a compromise on unconditional surrender, specifically
a guarantee for the emperor, end the war? Would a demonstration of the
bomb shock the Japanese into suing for peace?
As critics of Truman's decision have pointed out, each of those options
had significant advocates within government circles. And each presented
policy makers with reasons to avoid dropping the bomb-something that, as
historian Barton Bernstein pointed out, was "precisely what they were not
trying to do." But why not? Why did the decision makers who counseled use
of the bomb outweigh those who championed these various alternatives? By
applying the bureaucratic politics model, historians can better explain why
the alternatives were never seriously considered.
The chief advocates for continued conventional warfare came from the
navy. From the beginning, navy leaders had been skeptical of nuclear fis­
sion's military potential. Admiral William Leahy, the senior navy represen­
tative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also an expert on explosives, always
doubted the bomb would have anywhere near the force scientists predicted.
The Alamogordo test laid his argument to rest. Chief of Naval Operations
Admiral Ernest King believed a naval blockade would successfully end the
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 329

war. King had no qualms about developing the bomb, but as a loyal navy
officer, he hated to see the air force end a war that his service had dominated
for four years. He feared, too, that the bomb might undermine the navy's
importance after the war. Among military brass, Admirals Leahy and King
had somewhat less influence than General George Marshall, army chief of
staff. Marshall, along with General Douglas MacArthur, felt that further
delay would necessitate an invasion and an unacceptable loss of American
lives. Since they favored using the bomb instead, the navy lost that round.
Some members of the State Department, led by Acting Secretary of State
Joseph Grew, believed that diplomacy should end the war. As early as April
1945 Grew had urged administration officials to extend some guarantee that
the imperial throne would not be abolished. Without that assurance, he felt,
the peace party could never overcome the military's determination to fight
on. As former ambassador to Japan, Grew knew more about Japanese poli­
tics and culture than any major figure in the Truman administration. On the
other hand, he had spent much of his career as a foreign service officer far
from Washington. Thus he
could exert little personal
influence over Truman or Grew knew more about Japanese politics
key advisers. Even within the and culture, but had spent much of his
State Department, Assistant time far from Washington, so he had little
Secretaries Dean Acheson influence over Truman.
and Archibald MacLeish,
both more influential than
Grew, opposed his position. They considered the emperor as the symbol of
the feudal military tradition they hoped to see destroyed. By the time of the
Potsdam Conference, Grew had made just one convert for negotiations­
Secretary Stimson-and a partial convert-Harry Truman. "There was [sic]
pretty strong feelings," Stimson recalled, "that it would be deplorable if we
have to go through the military program with all its stubborn fighting to the
finish." Truman showed sufficient interest to arrange talks between Grew
and the military chiefs, but he did not feel he could bring congressional and
public opinion in line with Grew's position on the emperor.
The ghost of Franklin Roosevelt proved to be Grew's major opponent.
Lacking Roosevelt's prestige, popularity, and mastery of government, Tru­
man felt bound to pursue many of FDR's policies. Any move away from
"unconditional surrender" posed political risks at home and military risks
abroad that Truman did not feel strong enough to take. Acheson and
MacLeish reminded their colleagues that Americans despised Emperor
Hirohito as much as they did Hitler. The Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that
premature compromise might reduce the emperor's incentive to subdue mil­
itary extremists after the armistice.
James Byrnes emerged as the leading defender of unconditional surrender.
In contrast to Grew, Byrnes had little training in foreign affairs. His importance
in the government reflected his consummate skill at domestic politics. Dur­
ing the war, many people considered him second in power only to Roosevelt.
330 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

In fact, Truman himself had risen to prominence as Byrnes's protege and had
repaid his debt by making Byrnes secretary of state. Deep down, Byrnes could
not help feeling that he, not Truman, was the man best qualified to be presi­
dent. He never got over thinking of himself as Truman's mentor.
Byrnes was exceptionally sensitive to the political risks of modifying
unconditional surrender. More important, among Truman's advisers he
was the most preoccupied with the growing Soviet threat. Using the bomb
quickly would minimize Russian demands for territorial and political con­
cessions in Asia, he believed, as well as strengthen the United States in any
postwar negotiations. Since Byrnes's chief opponents, Grew and Stimson,
were old and near retirement, and since he had strong support in both the
military and State Department, his position carried the day. If the Japanese
"peace feelers" to Moscow had been followed by more substantive proposals,
to either the Russians or the Americans directly, perhaps some compromise
might have been reached. But no other proposals were forthcoming. Thus
at Potsdam, Byrnes and Truman remained convinced that the peace party
in Japan would never marshal enough support against the military unless
American attacks made further resistance seem futile. And it was again
Byrnes who persuaded Truman to delete a provision in the Allied declara­
tion that would have guaranteed the institution of the emperor.
By now it must be obvious why none of Truman's advisers wanted to
rely on Soviet entry into the war as an alternative to dropping the bomb. By
the time of the Potsdam Conference, Japan's military position had become
hopeless. Why encourage Stalin's ambitions, especially when the bomb was
available for use?
Some Americans proposed that the bomb be demonstrated before a group
of international observers instead of being dropped on Japan without warning.
But advocates of this alternative were found largely among scientists working
at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. This group had been the first to
finish its work on the bomb. While the Los Alamos lab rushed to complete
the designs for Little Boy and Fat Man, the Chicago lab began discussing the
postwar implications of nuclear weapons and the threat of an international
arms race. The eminent scientist Niels Bohr had already raised those issues
with Roosevelt and Churchill. Yet as we have seen, Churchill and Roosevelt
agreed at their 1944 Hyde Park meeting to keep the bomb secret from Stalin,
hoping to use it to advantage in any postwar rivalry with the Russians.
Unaware of the Hyde Park agreement, scientists continued to press their
case against a surprise nuclear attack. "It may be very difficult," Nobel Prize­
winner James Franck observed, "to persuade the world that a nation that was
capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscrimi­
nate as the [German] rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is
to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by
international agreement." As powerful as that argument was, it was a moral,
not a military, one. Equally important, scientists lacked the political influ­
ence to change policy. Only leaders such as Truman, Byrnes, and Stimson
had the power to do so. The decisions key officials debated, then, were not
 The Decitiun t1J Drop the Bomb 331

Fat Man, also familiarly known to scientists working on the project as Fat Boy.
The graffiti on the tail included the notation "Chicago is represented in here more
than once."

whether to drop the bombs, but where and when to use them. Here, too,
our models reveal both organizational processes and bureaucratic politics at
work. To select the targets, Groves appointed a target committee composed
of scientists and ordnance specialists. Their priorities reflected both the
military's desire to end the war quickly and the scientists' hope to transmit
a dramatic warning to the world. They sought cities that included military
installations, but they also wanted a site with a large concentration of struc­
tures subject to the blast, in case the bomb missed its primary target. Kyoto,
the ancient cultural and political center of Japan, topped their list.
Secretary of War Stimson vetoed that choice. As a former secretary of state
and a person of broad cultural and political experience, he believed that the
destruction of Kyoto would engender in the Japanese an undying bitterness
toward the United States. Any hopes of integrating a revitalized and reformed
Japan into a healthy postwar Asia might die with Kyoto. Stimson's position
near the top of the organizational hierarchy gave him a different perspective
from lower-level planners who weighed other issues. On the final target list
Hiroshima ranked first, Nagasaki ranked fourth, and Kyoto not at all.
3 32 AFn:R THE FACT: THI!. ART OF HISTORICAL Dl!.Tl!.CTION

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The letter outlining SOP for dropping the bomb. It authorized the "509
Composite Group, 20th Air Force" to "deliver its first special bomb as soon as
weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets:
Hiroshimat Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki." In a reflection of protocol, as well as a
hint of the rivalry between the army and navyt the letter instructs General Spaatz,
in paragraph four, to inform General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz of the
decision personally.
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 333

It was the weather and the routines of organization, not diplomatic or

military strategy, that sealed Nagasaki's fate. After the bombing of Hiro­
shima and the Russian declaration of war,Japanese leaders decided to sue for
peace. Advocates of surrender needed only enough time to work out accept­
able terms and to reconcile military officers to the inevitable. As the Japa­
nese discussed policy, the Americans followed standard military procedure.
Control shifted from the commander in Washington, President Truman,
to the commander of the bomber squadron on the island of Tinian in the
Pacific. Plans called for Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, to be ready by August 11.
Since work went faster than expected, the bomb crew advanced the date to
August 9. The forecast called for clear skies on the ninth, followed by five
days of bad weather. Urged on by the squadron commander, the crew had
Fat Man armed and loaded on the morning of the ninth. And again fol­
lowing military SOP, the pilot shifted his attack to Nagasaki when clouds
obscured his primary target.
Had the original plan been followed, Japan might well have surrendered
before the weather cleared. Nagasaki would have been spared. But the offi­
cer who ordered the attack had little appreciation of the larger military pic­
ture that made Nagasaki a target or that made the Soviet Union a diplomatic
problem connected with the atom bomb. He weighed factors important to
a bomb squadron commander, not to diplomats or political leaders. The
bombing of Nagasaki slipped from the hands of policy makers not because
of some rogue computer or any power-mad, maniacal general, but simply
because of military SOPs.
And so two bombs were dropped and the world entered the atomic age.

If historians based their interpretations on a single model, they would

never satisfy their desire to understand the sequence of events leading to
Nagasaki. Each model provides its own particular perspective, both clari­
fying and at the same time limiting. The use of several models allows the
historian the same advantage enjoyed by writers of fiction who employ more
than one narrator. Each narrator, like each model, affords the writer a new
vantage point from which to tell the story. The facts may not change, but
the reader sees them in another light. As organizations grow more complex,
models afford historians multiple perspectives from which to interpret the
same reality.
And yet we must remind ourselves that models do not work miracles, for
their potential to reveal new insights depends on the skills of the people
who build and apply them. If poorly applied, their seeming precision, like
reams of computer printout, conveys a false sense of empirical legitimacy.
Data specialists have coined the acronym GIGO to suggest the limits of such
mechanical devices-"garbage in, garbage out." In the end, historians must
remember that organizations are open systems existing within a broader
historical and cultural context. Even when our models have accounted for
goals, strategies, SOPs, and political influence, there remain those pieces
of the picture that are still irreducible: from scientists' dismay at the devil
334 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

The reaction of scientists watching the detonation of the first atomic bomb in
New Mexico was recalled by Robert Oppenheimer: "A few people laughed, a few
people cried, more people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from
the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should
do his duty: 'I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.' I think we all had this
feeling, more or less." The photograph is of an atomic blast detonated at Bikini
Island in July 1946.

of their creation to the inanimate, complex meteorological forces that com­

bined to dissipate the clouds over Nagasaki in August 1945.
Some elements of history will always remain stubbornly intractable,
beyond the reach of the model builders. The mushroom clouds over Japan
did not merely serve as a dramatic close to World War II. The afterglow
of their blasts destroyed a sense of security that Americans had enjoyed for
almost 150 years. After the war, the nuclear arms race turned the United
States into an armed camp. Given the limits of human understanding, who
in 1945 could have appreciated all the consequences that would result from
the decision to drop the atom bomb?
 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 335

Additional Reading

The creation and use of the atomic bomb ranks with slavery, democratic
reform, civil rights and liberties, economic justice, and possibly even the
Civil War as issues critical to the understanding of American history. Dur­
ing the early cold war, most Americans willingly accepted the rationale for
dropping the bombs offered in official accounts such as Harry S. Truman,
Memoirs, 1945: Year of Decisions (New York, 1955); Henry Stimson (with
McGeorge Bundy), On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1947);
Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told (New York, 1962); and Richard Hewlett
and Oscar Anderson, The New World: 1939-1946, vol. 1 of A History of the
United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park, PA, 1962). A use­
ful and full-length study of the controversy over casualty estimates is John
Ray Skates, Invasion ofJapan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, SC, 1994).
Another student of the bomb controversy, J. Samuel Walker, has summa­
rized much of the evidence in Prompt and Utter Destroction: Truman and the
Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).
Then in 1965 came Gar Alperovitz's bombshell, Atomic Diplomacy (New
York, 1965; rev. ed., 1985). Suddenly the rationale for building and using
the bomb seemed much less obvious. Alperovitz raised difficult questions
about official justifications of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Herbert Feis defended the official view in The Atomic Bomb and the End of
World War II (Princeton, NJ, 1966). The debate was continued with critical
studies by Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, rev. ed. (New York, 1985),
and Barton Bernstein, "Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb: A Rein­
terpretation," Political Science Quarterly 90 (spring 1975): 23-69. McGeorge
Bundy reviewed the moral and political debates about the bomb in Dan­
ger and Survival (New York, 1988). George Kennan, the father of the cold
war policy of containment, became more cautionary of nuclear diplomacy in
later years, as reflected in his Nuclear Delusion (New York, 1982). Alperovitz
and a team of research assistants responded to critics of his Atomic Diplomacy
in a thoroughly researched new book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
(New York, 1996).
An excellent collection of primary documents on the bomb's develop­
ment can be found in Michael Stoff, Jonathan Fanton, and R. Hal Williams,
eds., The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age
(New York, 1990). Many of the diaries, letters, and top-secret memoranda
are reproduced in facsimile form. The decision-making models we discuss
are more fully developed in another context in Graham Allison and Philip
Zelikow, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2d ed.
(Boston, MA, 1999 ). Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New
York, 1986), has written the most comprehensive and readable account
of the bomb project. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus:
The Triumph and Tragedy of]. Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 2006), draw
an intriguing portrait of the scientist most responsible for the Manhattan
336 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Project's success. They make clear that Oppenheimer was in no way dis­
loyal, as some of his enemies claimed. Daniel Kevles, The Physicists (New
York, 1977), and Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, reprint
(New York, 1986), provide background on members of the science com­
munity who helped create the bomb. Many went on to raise profound ques­
tions about what they had done and how their work was put to use. Gregg
Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert
Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller (New York, 2003), traces
the relationship of the three key physicists and the issues over which they
divided.
PAST AND PRESENT

Truckstop Atomic Science

The scientists and engineers who designed the first atomic weapon were
among the most brilliant in the world. Few, however, ever spoke publicly
about the bombs' inner workings. And for more than a half century, the
U.S. government has kept information about the design a secret, fearing that
enemies or terrorists might exploit it.
Recently, however, a detailed reconstruction of the bomb's inner work­
ings has emerged-written not by a physicist, engineer, or historian, nor
even by a college graduate. John Coster-Mullon was a truck driver from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, who earlier in his career had worked as a photogra­
pher. His book, published at the local Kinko's copy shop, appeared under
the title Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story ofLittle Boy and Fat Man. Its
accuracy astonished scientists.
Coster-Mullen began his fanatical quest to discover the bomb's design
when he and his son Jason constructed a model of Little Boy in his garage.
He wanted to get the details right and began gathering clues from the public
record, visiting museums from London to West Point to Los Alamos. He
pored over old photographs, even measured the bomb casings on display.
But what fit inside? And how?
At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, the bomb casing
had cryptic numbers scribbled on it: 36 and 52 on the side, 12 on the nose.
What did they mean? 52 struck a chord. A book on the Enola Gay described
Little Boy as possessing a 52-inch wooden gun barrel-used, supposedly,
to create a critical mass needed to detonate the bomb. Coster-Mullen knew
that a gun barrel made of wood was preposterous and that 52 inches was
far too long for the barrel itself. But another book had described a 24-inch
channel bored within the back of the bomb. Adding the 12-inch notation on
the bomb's nose yielded 36 inches. Other sources indicated that the projec­
tile used in the gun mechanism was 16 inches: 16 plus 36 totaled 52. Sud­
denly, Coster-Mullen had a clearer sense of how the parts fit together.
His background in photography paid dividends, too. Coster-Mullen
examined a photo of two Los Alamos scientists carrying a box housing a

337
338 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

plutonium assembly. One bomb machinist had told him that the mechanism
inside was 11 or 12 inches long. Directly behind the box was a car he iden­
tified as a 1942 Plymouth. One day he spied just that model parked at an
antique auto dealership. By measuring the height of its door, estimating the
distance of the photographer from the car in the photo, and determining the
ratios, he calculated the size of the box at 101h inches. Clearly, an object in
the box had to be shorter than 11 or 12 inches.
And so it went, step by excruciating step. What fueled Coster-Mullen's
obsession to get the details right? Partly, it was a mental challenge, not unlike
solving a complex crossword puzzle. But he also objected to what he saw as
a foolish attempt to keep secrets. Any terrorist could find an atomic bomb
design on the Internet. As historian Richard Rhodes commented, a group
bent on creating havoc "hardly needs the help of us poor souls, who aren't
even scientists" to build a bomb. For Rhodes and Coster-Mullen, officials
seemed guided largely by the principle "I can have the truth and you can't."
So a truck driver defeated government efforts to keep an antique secret
that nuclear technology had long ago passed by. In the future, a scientist
suggested, security officials might want to work more closely with Coster­
Mullen, so "if there really is something they want to keep close, they might
have a clearer idea how to do it."
CHAPTER 14

From Rosie to Lucy

If the media of the 195Os brainwashed women to be contented

housewives and mothers, how did so many women of the 1960s
develop a feminist consciousness?

It was 1957. Betty Friedan was not just complaining; she was angry for her­
self and uncounted other women like her. For some time, she had sensed that
the discontent she felt as a suburban housewife and mother was not peculiar
to her alone. Now she was certain, as she read the results of a questionnaire
she had circulated to about 200 postwar graduates of Smith College. The
women who answered were not frustrated simply because their educations
had not properly prepared them for the lives they were leading; rather, these
women resented the wide disparity between the idealized image society held
of them as housewives and mothers and the realities of their daily routines.
True, most were materially well off. The majority had families, a house
in the suburbs, and the amenities of an affluent society. But amid that good
fortune they felt fragmented, almost as if they had no identity of their own.
And it was not only college graduates. "I've tried everything women are sup­
posed to do," one woman confessed to Friedan.

Hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors,

j oining committees, running PTA teas.I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn't
leave you anything to think about-any feeling of who you are....I love the
kids and Bob and my home. There's no problem you can even put a name to.
But I'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food
and putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when
you want something. But who am I?

A similar sense of incompleteness haunted Friedan. "I, like other women,

thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't have an orgasm
waxing the kitchen floor," she recalled with some bitterness.
This growing unease led her to raise some disturbing questions. Why,
she wondered, had she chosen fifteen years earlier to give up a promising
career in psychology for marriage and motherhood? What was it that kept
women from using the rights and prerogatives that were theirs? What made
them feel guilty for anything they did in their own right rather than as their

339
340 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

husbands' wives or children's mothers? Women in the 1950s, it seemed to

Friedan, were not behaving quite the way they had a decade earlier. During
World War II the popular press extolled the virtues of women like "Rosie
the Riveter"-those who left homes and families to join the workforce. Now,
Rosie was no longer a heroine. The media lavished their praise on women
who devoted themselves to family and home. In the closing scene of one
1957 Redhook article, the heroine, "Junior" (a "little freckle-faced brunette"
who had chosen to give up her job), nurses her baby at two in the morning,
sighing, "I'm so glad, glad, glad I'm just a housewife." What had happened?
"When did women decide to give up the world and go back home?" Friedan
asked herself.
Questions like those have engaged historians since the 1970s, but they
were not ones housewives of the 195Os were encouraged to ask. For a red­
blooded American to doubt something as sacred as the role of housewife and
mother was to show symptoms of mental disorder rather than a skeptical
or inquiring mind. Whatever the label attached to such feelings-neurosis,
anxiety, or depression-most people assumed that unhappy women needed
only to become better adjusted to who and what they were.
Friedan, however, was no ordinary housewife. At Smith College she
fought against anti-Semitism and, as a graduate student at Berkeley, associ­
ated with Bay Area radicals. Before starting her family, she had written for
labor union publications and as a newspaper reporter; even after her children
were born, she wrote regularly for the major women's magazines. Opposition
to inequality and exploitation shaped her worldview. By 1957 she was fed up
with the endless stories about breast-feeding, the preparation of gourmet
chip dips, and similar domestic fare that was the staple of Redhook, McCall's,
and Ladies' Home Journal. She had noticed many women like herself who
worked outside the home and felt guilty because their jobs threatened their
husbands' roles as providers or took time away from their children. Thus
Friedan began to wonder not only about herself as a woman, a wife, and a
mother, but also about the role society had shaped women to play.
The results of the Smith questionnaire suggested to Friedan that she was
onto a story bigger than anything she had ever written. But when she cir­
culated an article describing the plight so many women were experiencing,
the male editors at the women's magazines turned it down flat. It couldn't
be true, they insisted; women could not possibly feel as guilty or discon­
tented as Friedan claimed. The problem must be hers. "Betty has gone off
her rocker," an editor at Redhook told her agent. "She has always done a good
job for us, but this time only the most neurotic housewife could identify."
Friedan was not deterred. If the magazines would not print her story, she
would do it as a book. For five years, she researched and wrote, exploring
what she called the "feminine mystique," a phenomenon she saw embedded
in American culture:

The new mystique makes the housewife-mother, who never had a chance
to be anything else, the model for all women ... it simply makes certain
 F1T111t Rosie to Lucy 341

A happy housewife with a week's work. By 1947 many women laborers were
back in the home full-time and the baby boom was under way. Life magazine
celebrated the labors of a typical housewife by laying out a week's worth of bed
making, ironing, washing, grocery shopping, and dish washing for a family of four.
An incomplete tally shows more than 250 plates being washed and thirty-five quarts
of milk consumed a week. Did the wife drink the majority of the six cups of coffee
that seem to have been consumed per day?

concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence-as it was lived by

women whose lives were confined by necessity to coo.king, cleaning, washing,
bearing children-into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now
live or deny their femininity.

By the time Friedan was finished, the book had become a crusade. "I have
never experienced anything as powerful, truly mystical, as the forces that
seemed to overtake me as I wrote The Feminine Mystique," she later admit­
ted. Published in 1963, the book soon joined the ranks of truly consequential
books in American history. What Harriet Beecher Stowe did for slaves in
342 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jacob Riis for the urban poor in How the Other HalfLives,
Upton Sinclair for public health in The Jungle, or Rachel Carson for the
environment in Silent Spring, Friedan did for women. No longer would they
bear their dissatisfaction in silence as they confronted the gap between their
personal aspirations and the limited avenues society had left open to them.
Friedan helped inspire a generation of women to demand the equal rights
and opportunities that men routinely claimed.

RETREAT FROM REVOLUTION:

A DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE
The feminist movement that blossomed in the wake of the civil rights move­
ment of the 1960s had a profound impact on the study of history as well.
After all, many of the questions Friedan raised were the sort that histori­
ans are trained to explore. Was it true that women hadn't followed up on
the gains in employment they experienced during World War II? What
caused society in postwar America to place so much emphasis on home and
family? What was the image of women that the mass media, scholars, and
other opinion makers presented? Friedan, however, was a journalist, not a
historian. True, historians and journalists share many methods in common.
Both write more confidently when they can confirm their story from mul­
tiple sources. Like many historians, Friedan turned to the social sciences for
theory and methods. She canvassed articles in popular women's magazines,
studied the recent scholarship, and talked to psychologists, sociologists, and
marriage counselors who regularly treated women. She conducted in-depth
interviews with women of varying ages, backgrounds, and social classes.
It was not her methods, however, that influenced the study of history.
Rather, it was the subject she chose to probe. Prior to the 1970s, history as
a discipline gave slight attention to the experience of women, even though
they constituted more than half the world's population. The vast majority
of studies (most of which were written
by men anyway) concentrated on topics
Prior to the 1970s, history as a
in the public arena. Politics, business,
intellectual life, diplomacy, war-all
discipline gave slight attention
were areas in which males defined the to the experience ofwomen.
terms of action. The few women who
did enter the history books were there most often because, like Eleanor
Roosevelt, they had lived a public life; like Jane Addams, they initiated social
reform; like Margaret Mead, they contributed in major ways to the social
sciences; or like Willa Cather, they stood among the nation's leading writers
and artists. Those women were exceptional, and it was the exceptional, not
the commonplace, that historians generally preferred to study.
Still, history has by no means been confined to the rich, powerful, famous,
and male-as we have seen in earlier chapters. And particularly for the
twentieth century, documentary materials like the census made it possible
 From Rosie to Lucy 343

to study ordinary people in a macrocosmic sense, looking at the actions of

millions of people in the aggregate. Along with the new statistical census
procedures adopted in 1940 came sophisticated opinion polling. Advertisers
in the 1930s sought to discover more about consumer preferences so they
could pitch their products more effectively. George Gallup developed sur­
vey techniques that allowed pollsters to determine mass opinions on a mul­
titude of issues. Polling had been done before Gallup began his work, but he
and his rivals undertook it much more systematically, devising better ways of
recording opinions, more sophisticated techniques for minimizing margins
of error, and more scientific means of asking questions.
In the academic world, the expansion of social science theory enlarged the
kinds of information people thought worth having as well as the means for
interpreting such data. As we saw in Chapter 12, social scientists were able
to learn much about the causes for mass migrations in the 1930s. Thus when
historians began investigating women's status in the mid-twentieth century,
they could draw on a good deal of statistical information. The data they
found in some ways challenged Friedan's picture of women being pushed
out of the workforce, but in other ways her view was strikingly confirmed.
Census data and other governmental records indeed show that many women
entered higher-paying and more-skilled jobs as early as Wodd War I. But
those gains were short-lived. With the return of peace, women faced layoffs,
renewed wage discrimination, and segregation into female-only jobs such
as teaching and nursing. Women made little headway over the next decade,
despite the hoopla about the emancipated "new woman" of the twenties.
Behind the stereotype of the smart-talking flapper with her cigarette, bobbed
hair, and boyish clothes, traditional ideas about women and their proper roles
prevailed in the labor marketplace. In 1920, 23 percent of women worked; by
1930, the figure rose to only 24 percent. Access to the professions increased
but remained heavily restricted. For example, women earned more than 30
percent of all graduate degrees but accounted for only 4 percent of full pro­
fessors on college faculties. Most women workers were young, single, and
without children, and they toiled at unskilled jobs. Between 1920 and 1930,
the percentage of women in manufacturing fell from 22.6 (the same as in
1910) to 17.5, while the percentages of women in both domestic service and
clerical work-the lowest-paying jobs-rose.
Real gains for women came during Wodd War II. A rapidly expanding
war economy absorbed most of the reserve labor force of underemployed or
unemployed male workers. The military alone siphoned off some 15 million
men and women. That left married women as the single largest untapped
labor reserve. Suddenly, the propaganda machinery that had once discour­
aged women from competing with men for jobs urged them to enlist in the
workforce. The patriotic appeal had the desired effect. What faithful wife
could sit at home when the media warned that her husband in the service
might die from the lack of ammunition? Commando Mary and Rosie the
Riveter became symbols of women who heeded their country's call to join
the production line.
344 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Patriotism by itself did not explain the willingness of married women to

take jobs. Many found higher war wages an attractive inducement. Indeed,
with so many husbands earning low military pay, families needed additional
income to survive. Absent husbands also meant that domestic life was less
central. Women had more time and opportunity for work outside the home.
And wartime restrictions on leisure activities made jobs a more attractive
outlet for women's energies. Whether stated as raw numbers or percent­
ages, the statistical gains for women were impressive. From 1940 to 1945
some 6.5 million women entered the workforce, more than half of them for
the first time. Women accounted for just 2 5 percent of workers in 1940 but
36 percent in 1945. Perhaps more significant were the kinds of women who
now found employment outside the home. Young, single women no longer
dominated. By 1950 married women were a majority of the female work­
force, compared with only a third in 1940. Similarly, older women between
ages fifty-five and sixty-four became a major working group, rising from
17 percent in 1940 to 35 percent by 1960.
It was not only the numbers of working women that soared but also the
quality of their jobs. Women had an opportunity to work in skilled areas of
manufacturing and to earn much higher wages. Black women in particular,
who had been stuck in low-paying farm and domestic jobs, rushed to the
factories that offered higher pay and better hours. Women on the assembly
lines shaped sheet metal, built airplanes, and performed a host of skilled tasks.
Suddenly, stereotypes about traditional male and female roles had shattered.
Yet for all these undeniable gains, the situation brought about by a world
at war was a special case, and most Americans perceived it that way. The
men returning home intended to pick up their jobs, and most men assumed
that women would return to their traditional household duties. As a result,
the war led to few structural changes affecting women's economic roles. For
example, working mothers needed some form of day care for their young
children. The government was slow to provide it, and even where it existed,
many mothers were reluctant to use it. For them, the responsibilities of the
job were secondary to those of the home.
Most professions continued to maintain barriers against women.
Among the female workers who flooded government bureaucracies and
factories, few received managerial status. And many employers found
ways to avoid government regula-
tions requiring equal pay for men
Most professions continued to
and women. General Motors, for
example, simply changed its job maintain barriers against women.
classifications.Jobs once designated
as male or female became "heavy" or "light." Women generally were assigned
to the light, lower-paying categories. Fearful that rapidly rising wages would
spur inflation, the government was slow to enforce its own rules protecting
women from discrimination.
Certain social trends seemed to underscore the traditional resistance to
working mothers. Some public officials worried about statistics indicating
 From Rosie to Lucy 345

that wartime stresses threatened to undermine the family. Americans have

always seen the family as the foundation of the social order, and wartime
did nothing to change that view. The increase in alcohol abuse, divorce, and
juvenile delinquency all suggested a weakening family structure. Apparently,
so did emotional problems among children such as bed wetting, thumb suck­
ing, and truancy.
Observers were quick to blame those problems on one cause-maternal
neglect. In fact, there was no clear evidence that the families of work­
ing women had any disadvantage over those whose mothers stayed home.
Extraordinary wartime mobility, not the fact that the mothers worked,
seems to have accounted for many of those problems. The sudden rush of
workers, both male and female, to industrial centers overtaxed all manner
of public services, including housing and schools, which were of particular
importance to families with young children. The war disrupted families
whether mothers worked or not.
What is striking is that by 1945, despite all the gains women had made,
most attitudes about women and work had not changed substantially. Sur­
veys showed that Americans, whether male or female, continued to believe
that child rearing was a woman's primary job. Thus the marked demo­
graphic shift of women into the workforce was revolutionary in import, but
it brought no revolution in cultural attitudes toward gender roles. As his­
torian William Chafe commented, "The events of the war years suggested
that most Americans would accept a significant shift in women's economic
activities as long as the shift was viewed as 'temporary' and did not entail a
conscious commitment to approve the goals of a sexual revolution."
Despite the general expectation that women would return to the home
after the war, female laborers did not simply drop their wrenches and pick up
frying pans. Many continued to work outside the home, although mostly to
support their families, not to find career alternatives. As peace came in 1945,
polls indicated that more than 75 percent of all working women wanted to
continue at their jobs. About 88 percent of high school girls surveyed said
they hoped for a career as well as the role of homemaker. Although employ­
ment for women did shrink slightly, a significantly higher percentage of
women were working in 1950 than in 1940 (28 percent versus 24 percent).
Even more striking, that figure continued to rise, reaching 36 percent by
1960. Those numbers included older women, married women with children,
and women of all social classes.
Such statistics would seem at first to undercut Friedan's notion that the
vast majority of American women accepted the ideal of total fulfillment
through housework and child rearing. Some 2.25 million women did volun­
tarily return home after the war, and another million were laid off by 1946.
At the same time, 2. 75 million women entered the job market by 194 7, leav­
ing a net loss of only half a million.
But even ifFriedan was mistaken in seeing a mass female exodus from the
workforce, a significant shift did take place in the types of work performed.
When women who had been laid off managed to return to work, they often
346 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

lost their seniority and had to accept reduced pay in lower job categories.
Employment in almost all the professions had decreased by 1960. Despite
gains in some areas, women were concentrated in jobs that were primarily
extensions of their traditional responsibility for managing the family's physi­
cal and emotional well-being: they were nurses, not doctors; teachers, not
principals; tellers, not bankers. Far more worked in service jobs (as maids
or waitresses, for example) than in manufacturing. Overwhelmingly, job
opportunities were segregated by gender. About 75 percent of all women
workers held female-only jobs. In fact, gender segregation in the workplace
was worse in 1960 than in 1900-and even worse than segregation by race.
Thus, even though women's participation in the workforce remained com­
paratively high, it did not inspire a corresponding revolution in attitudes
about women's roles in society.

RETREAT FROM REVOLUTION: THE ROLE

OF MASS MEDIA
Attitudes, of course, were at the center of Friedan's concerns in The Femi­
nine Mystique, and the demographic profile we have sketched underlines the
reason for her focus. If the percentage of women holding jobs continued
to increase during the 195Os and if young women, when polled, said they
hoped to combine work in some way with motherhood, how did the cult of
the "feminine mystique" become so firmly enshrined? If wartime laboring
conditions produced a kind of revolution in fact but not in spirit, what ele­
ments of American culture reined in that revolution and kept it from run­
ning its course?
As Friedan was well aware, economic and demographic factors played a
crucial role in renewing the concern with home and family living. The hard
times of the Depression had discouraged couples from starting large families.
But as war production renewed prosperity and soldiers headed off to war, the
birthrate began to climb. With the return of peace in 1945, Gis were eager
to do more than kiss their wives hello. For the next fifteen years the United
States had one of the highest birthrates in the world, rising from an average
of 1.9 to 2.3 children for each woman of childbearing age. Large families
became the norm. The number of parents with three children tripled, while
those with four quadrupled. Women also married younger. The average age
of marriage dropped from 22 in 1900 to 20.3 in 1962. The United States had
the highest rate of marriage of any nation in the world, and American men
and women chose to organize their lives around family.*
Clearly, material conditions not only pushed women out of the workplace
as Gis rejoined the peacetime economy but also pulled women back into the
home as the birthrate rose. Friedan acknowledged these changes but noted

*At the same time, the United States had the world's highest divorce rate. Enthusiasm for marriage
was apparently no guarantee of success.
 Frum Rosie w Lucy 347

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Women of the Saturday E'lJenmg Post, Part One. In the midst of the war, the
POS'l's "cover girl'' was this confident Rosie, patriotic buttons across her chest,
goggles over her eyes, macho watchband around her wrist, and biceps calculated to
make Charles Atlas envious. As one real-life Rosie commented about welding, "We
were happy to be doing it. We felt terrific. Lunch hour would find us spread out
on the sidewalk. Women welders with our outfits on, and usually a quart of milk
in one hand and a salami sandwich in another. It was an experience that none of us
had ever had before."

that the birthrates of other economically developed nations-such as France,

Norway, and Sweden-had begun to decline by 1955. Even more striking,
the sharpest rise in the United States came among women ages fifteen to
nineteen. In Great Britain, Canada, and Germany, on the other hand, the
rise was more equally distributed among age groups. What was it that made
so many American teen brides give up the chance of college and a career for
early marriage and homemaking?
Friedan's answer was to look more closely at the mass media. Magazines,
radio, movies, and television had all come to play a predominant role in
the modern era. They exposed Americans to powerfully presented messages
conveying the standards and ideals of the culture. The media, observed
348 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

sociologist Harold Lasswell in 1948,had come to perform many of the tasks

that the Catholic Church assumed in medieval Europe.Like the church,the
media possessed the capacity to send the same message to all classes at the
same time, with confidence in their authority to speak and to be heard uni­
versally. Friedan, for her part, believed that in the postwar era the media's
message about women-what they could dream of, set their sights on, and
accomplish-underwent a marked shift. From her perspective, the purvey­
ors of popular culture suddenly seemed determined to persuade women
that they should not just accept but actually embrace the idealized image of
women as wives and mothers.
Having written for the mass-circulation women's magazines, Friedan
already knew they played a role in promoting the feminine mystique.What
surprised her was how much the image of women had become domesti­
cated in the postwar era.In the 1930s,the woman most likely to appear in a
magazine story had a career and was as much concerned with a goal of her
own as with getting her man.The heroine of a typical Ladies' Home Journal
story in 1939 is a nurse who has "strength in her hands, pride in her car­
riage and nobility in the lift of her chin ...she left training,nine years ago.
She had been on her own ever since.
She had earned her way, she need The new women did not work
consider nothing but her heart." And
"except housework and work to
unlike the heroines of the 1950s, these
women did not have to choose invari­
keep their bodies beautiful and
ably between marriage and career. If to get and keep a man. "
they held strongly to their dreams,they
could have both. Beginning in 1950s fictional magazine stories, however,
new heroines appeared.These, Friedan noted, were most often "young and
frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a
world of bedroom and kitchen,sex,babies,and home." The new women did
not work "except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to
get and keep a man." "Where," Friedan asked rhetorically, "is the world of
thought and ideas,the life of the mind and the spirit?"
Talking with some of the few remaining editors from the 1930s, Friedan
discovered one reason for the change. "Most of the material used to come
from women writers," one explained. "As the young men returned from the
war,a great many women writers stopped writing.The new writers were all
men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy
domestic life." Male editors, when queried, defended themselves by con­
tending that their readers no longer identified with career women,no longer
read serious fiction, and had lost almost all interest in public issues except
perhaps those that affected the price of groceries."You just can't write about
ideas or broad issues of the day for women," one remarked.
In the 1930s, magazines,newspapers, radio, and movies had set the fash­
ion. By the 1950s, those media had begun to lose their audience to televi­
sion.Women who had once gone to the matinee stayed home to watch the
latest episode of As the World Turns. In 1951,cities with television networks
 From Rosie w Luq 349

Women of the S/#ll!rday Evening Post, Part Two. Biceps and riveting guns had
deserted Post covers by 1956. Instead, these two women-like Margaret in Father
KtuJws Best-can barely get their cars out the driveway, let alone down the street.
No doubt, however, they could stir up a meanJell-0 salad.

reported a 20 percent to 40 percent decline in movie attendance. Almost over­

night, television became the preeminent mass medium, carrying images-­
feminine or otherwise-of American culture into the home. By 1949, there
were about a million sets and 108 licensed stations, most in large urban mar­
kets. By 1952, 15 million Americans had bought sets; by 1955, the figure had
jumped to 30 million; by 1960, television had entered 46million homes. In
fact, more American homes had television sets than had bathrooms! Obvi­
ously, if we are to understand how the mass media of the 1950s shaped the
image of women, our inquiry must focus on television.*
And indeed, television portrayed women of the fifties in predictable ways.
Most often they were seen in domestic dramas or comedies in which Mom

•The technology ofbroadcasting had been available in the 1920s, but only after World War II did
commercial application begin in earnest. As secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover had his image
transmitted in 1927. making him the first president t.o appear on television, although this appearance
occurred before his election in 1928. Franklin Roosevelt was, in 1939, the first sitting president in
office t.o appear on television.
3 50 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

and Dad were found living happily with their two or three cute children and
possibly a live-in maid or relative to provide additional comic situations. The
homes in which they lived, even that of blue-collar airplane riveter Ches­
ter Riley (The Life ofRiley, 1949-1950, 1953-1958), were cheerfully middle
class, with the antiseptic look of a furniture showroom. As for Mom herself,
she never worked outside the home and seldom seemed to do much more
than wave a dust cloth or whip up a three-course meal at a moment's notice.
Sometimes, as in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1955-1966), she is
competent, cool, and collected. Ozzie, in fact, often seems rather a lost soul
when turned loose in his own castle and has to be guided gently through the
current week's predicament by Harriet. In other series, such as The George
Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-1958), women like Gracie Allen and her
friend Blanche play the role of "dizzy dames," unable to balance checkbooks
and sublimely oblivious to the realities of the business world. When Harry
Morton announces to his wife, Blanche, "I've got great news for you!" (he's
been offered a new job), Blanche replies, "When can I wear it?"
Perhaps the domestic comedy that best portrayed the archetypal fam­
ily woman was Father Knows Best (1954-1962). The title says it all: Rob­
ert Young, playing Jim Anderson, never lacks a sane head, while his wife,
Margaret, is stuck in the thrall of domestic life. She lacks Gracie Allen's
originality yet still can be counted on as a source of genial humor who could
on occasion correct the men in her family. Margaret is the fifties housewife
personified.
In one sense, then, Friedan does have a case. The mass media of the 1950s,
television prime among them, saturated the American public with the image
of the new feminine mystique. But to establish that finding merely raises a
much thornier issue: what sort of relationship is there between the media
and reality? Friedan is arguing not merely that the institutions of mass com­
munication promoted the feminine mystique; she is suggesting that, through
their influence and pervasiveness, the media seduced women into the cult of
domesticity. If Friedan was correct, we can understand why women's gains
during the war did not translate into a revolution of the spirit.

REFLECTION VERSUS MANIPULATION

What effect do the mass media have on real life? Obviously, that question
is a complex one. Most Americans resist the idea that the images they see
on television, in advertising, or in films have any purpose beyond plain and
simple entertainment. But surely the reality is more complicated. Every day,
Americans are bombarded by images that in ways both subtle and overt exert
a powerful, though far from clearly understood, influence.
In sorting out possible answers, we can see two sharply contrasting
hypotheses for gauging the media's impact. On the one hand is the argu­
ment that, in fact, the media have very little effect on the real world, since
they merely reflect tastes and opinions that mass audiences already hold.
 From Rosie to Lucy 3 51

Confronted with a need to attract the largest number of consumers, media

executives select programs that have the broadest appeal. Advertisers seek
less to alter values than to channel existing ones toward a specific choice.
Americans already value romantic love; once Ralph Lauren has his way,
they wear his clothes to achieve it. In the most extreme form, this reflection
hypothesis would see the media as essentially passive-a simple mirror to
society. And with that argument, a good deal of Friedan's examination of
female imagery might be instructive but beside the point. Women of the
fifties were portrayed the way they were because, for whatever reasons, they
had been transformed by the conditions of postwar culture.
But that extreme form of the reflection hypothesis breaks down for sev­
eral reasons. First, if we argue that the mass media are merely reflections,
then what are they reflecting? Surely not "real life" pure and simple. Only
in commercials do women who use Fructis shampoo and men who wear Axe
deodorant make their mates swoon. The parents on Father Knows Best are
happily married with three children, hardly the statistical norm in America
even then. Divorced, single-parent mothers were unknown in sitcom land.
African American, Latino, or Asian families were virtually nonexistent.
Obviously, while the media reflect certain aspects of real life, the reflection
hypothesis must be modified to admit that a good deal of what is reflected
comprises idealized values-what people would like to be rather than what
they really are.
But if mass communications reflect ideals as much as reality, whose ideals
are these? African American scholar bell hooks (she purposely lowercases her
name) argued that "many audiences in the United States resist the idea that
images have an ideological intent. . . .
Image making is political-that politics
If mass communications reflect
of domination informs the way the vast
ideals as much as reality, whose
majority of images are constructed and
marketed." That domination was pre­ ideals are these?
cisely the problem Friedan addressed.
As she pointed out, most of the editors, producers, directors, and writers of
the 1950s were men. If male rather than female ideals and aspirations were
being communicated (or, for that matter, white rather than Latino, middle­
class rather than lower-class, or the ideals of any limited group), then it again
becomes legitimate to ask how much the ideals of one segment of America
are shaping those of a far wider audience.
Of course, many of the people involved in producing mass culture would
argue that in the matter of dreams and ideals, they are not selling their own,
they are merely giving the audience what it wants. But do audiences know what
they really want? Surely they do sometimes. But they may also be influenced,
cajoled, and swayed. Persuasion, after all, is at the heart of modem advertising.
A fifties marketing executive made the point quite freely, noting that

in a free enterprise economy, we have to develop the need for new products.
And to do that we have to liberate women to desire these new products. We
3 52 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

help them rediscover that homemaking is more creative than to compete with
men. This can be manipulated. We sell them what they ought to want, speed
up the unconscious, move it along.

A better case for domination or manipulation would be hard to make.

Perhaps the most obvious case of an audience susceptible to persuasion is
children. Psychological research has indicated that among children, a pro­
cess called modeling occurs,
simply by watching others, without any direct reinforcement for learning
and without any overt practice. The child imitates the model without being
induced or compelled to do so. That learning can occur in the absence of
direct reinforcement is a radical departure from earlier theories that regarded
reward or punishment as indispensable to learning. There is now considerable
evidence that children do learn by watching and listening to others even in the
absence of reinforcement and overt practice.
Obviously, if young girls learn week in and week out that father does indeed
know best and that a woman's place is in the home, the potential for assert­
ing an ideology of male dominance is strong.
The hypothesis that the media may be manipulative contrasts sharply
with the theory that they are only reflective. More realistically, though, the
two alternatives are best seen as the poles of a continuum. In its extreme
form, the reflection hypothesis sees the media as entirely neutral, with no
influence whatever. The manipulative hypothesis, in its extreme form, treats
the media as highly controlling, brainwashing viewers (to use a term popular
in the anticommunist fifties) into believing and acting in ways they never
would have on their own. But a young girl, no matter how long she watches
television, is also shaped by what she learns from her parents, schoolteach­
ers, religious instructors, and a host of other influences. Given those con­
tending factors, how decisive a role can the media play?
Ironically, the more extreme forms of the manipulative hypothesis have
been supported by both the left and right wings of the political spectrum.
During the 1950s, for example, with worries of foreign subversion running
high, conservative ideologues warned that communists had come to rely
"more on radio and TV than on the press and motion pictures as 'belts' to
transmit pro-Sovietism to the American public." On the other hand, lib­
eral intellectuals charged that mass culture, at its worst, threatened "not
merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our senses by paving the way
to totalitarianism."
Historians have stepped only gingerly into the debate over media influ­
ence. In part their hesitation may be because, like most scholars, they tend
not to be heavy consumers of mass culture themselves. Preferring a sym­
phony by Brahms to rap, Federico Fellini's 8 112 to The Dark Knight, or
Masterpiece Theatre to American Idol, their instinctive reaction is to deem
popular fare "worthy of attention only if it is created by unpaid folk and
'serious' artists who do not appear to think about making a living," as soci­
ologist Herbert Gans has tartly remarked.
 From Rosie to Lucy 353

By temperament and training, most historians are also more comfortable

with the traditional print media. When they seek to explicate a document,
book, or diary, they can readily find the text and use common critical strate­
gies to identify thematic, symbolic, or cultural content. Insofar as the author
of the document is sensitive to issues that concern some significant sector of
society, the text can be said to reflect on social reality.
But what if the "text" is a series of commercials plugging the virtues of
Crest toothpaste or a year's worth of the soap opera General Hospital? In
that case, historians confront two difficulties. A vast amount of broadcast
material from the 1950s was ephemeral-not permanently recorded at the
time it was broadcast and no longer recoverable. The actual content of many
broadcasts can be reconstructed, if at all, only from file scripts or memories
of viewers or participants. Even in situations in which television material
has been saved and can be analyzed for its cultural content, a knowledge of
how the audience received a program or commercial is crucial. As Gans has
insisted, "cultural values cannot be determined from cultural content, until
we know why people chose it." Do viewers watch a program intensely, or
does it serve simply as background noise? Historians seldom have the means
to answer that question satisfactorily.
Sociologists and cultural anthropologists are the scholars most likely to
help historians determine the influence of the media-particularly television­
in modern life. But while sociologists have run a number of interesting studies
involving the effect of television violence and racial stereotypes on viewers,
much less systematic evidence has been gathered on television's effect on
women. The most promising work has centered on what is known as content
analysis. A content-analysis researcher examines a body of evidence, scan­
ning it systematically in order to answer a few objective questions. How often
are sex and violence linked in network crime shows? The researcher picks a
sample group of shows, views them on a regular basis, and counts the number
of incidents involving sex and violence. The results, of course, are descrip­
tive within fairly limited bounds. They can tell us, for example, how often
women appear in certain roles, but not how the audience perceives or values
those roles. Nor can we know, except indirectly, what the shows' producers
actually intended. If women are always portrayed in inferior positions, we can
infer that the producers saw women as inferior; but the inference remains
unproved.
Content analysis of early programming has led sociologist Gaye Tuch­
man to conclude that television practiced the "symbolic annihilation of
women." By that she meant that women were "demeaned, trivialized, or
simply ignored." Surveys of television programs revealed that women, who
constituted more than half the population, accounted for just 32 percent of
the characters in prime-time dramas. Most of the women who did appear
in prime time were concentrated in comedy series. Children's cartoons had
even fewer female characters. In the shows in which women appeared most
often-daytime soap operas-they still held inferior positions. A 1963 survey
showed, in fact, that men held 80 percent of all jobs in prime-time shows.
3 54 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Women were demeaned in other ways. They were most often the victims of
violence, not the perpetrators. Single women were attacked more frequently
than married women. The
women most favorably portrayed
were those who were court­
Even in soap operas, usually set
ing or had a family role. In the in homes in which women might
1950s two-thirds of all the women presumably be allowed to act as leaders,
characters on television shows it was usually men who found the
were married, had been married, solutions to family problems.
or were engaged. Even in soap
operas, usually set in homes in
which women might presumably be allowed to act as leaders, women's roles
were trivialized, for it was usually men who found the solutions to family
problems.
Much early content-analysis research was not designed to focus specifi­
cally on women. But studies analyzing the settings of shows and the psycho­
logical characteristics of heroes, villains, and supporting characters indirectly
support Tuchman's conclusion, because they show that the world of televi­
sion drama was overwhelmingly white, middle class, suburban, family cen­
tered, and male dominated. In eighty-six prime-time dramas aired during
1953, men outnumbered women 2 to 1. The very young (under twenty) and
the old (over sixty) were underrepresented. The characters were largely of
childbearing age and were employed or employable. High white-collar or
professional positions were overrepresented at the expense of routine white­
collar or blue-collar jobs. Most characters were sane, law abiding, healthy,
and white (more than 80 percent). Blacks, who accounted for 12 percent of
the population, appeared in only 2 percent of the roles. Heroes outnum­
bered heroines 2 to 1; and since heroic foreigners were more likely to be
women, that left three American heroes for each American heroine.
In these same eighty-six shows, male villains outnumbered female vil­
lains. Feminists might take this fact to heart as a more positive presenta­
tion of women. Villains, however, had many traits that Americans admired.
Although viewers saw them as unattractive, dishonest, disloyal, dirty, stingy,
and unkind, villains also appeared brave, strong, sharper, or harder than most
heroes, and had inner strength. Thus they were imposing, if undesirable,
characters. In minimizing women as villains, television preserved a male­
comforting stereotype while depriving women of yet another set of roles
in which they could be effective. Similarly, television dramas presented the
most favorable stereotypes of professions in which men dominated. Jour­
nalists, doctors, and entertainers all had positive images, while teachers-a
large majority of whom were women-were treated as the slowest, weakest,
and softest professionals (though clean and fair).
So far as content analysis is able to go, then, it confirms that television did
systematically reinforce the feminine mystique that Betty Friedan found so
prevalent elsewhere. But along with the advantages of content analysis come
limits. To be rigorous, the method of measuring must be standardized, and
 From Rosie to Lucy 355

the questions asked must be fairly limited and objective. For example, one
content analyst described her approach in this way:

Between March 18 and March 31, 197 5, I watched and coded the shows,
according to pretested categories. Using a specially prepared timer, I exam­
ined the first verbal or nonverbal interaction clearly between two people in
thirty seconds of one-minute segments of the programs. I recorded who was
dominant, dominated, or equal in each interaction and noted the relevant
occupation status, sex, race, and family role of each participant.

This approach is admirably systematic, but it leaves little room for more
qualitative judgments-for evaluating the nuances of an image as well as its
overt content. Sociologists, of course, would say that such subjective analysis
is precisely what they are trying to avoid, because any nuances are likely to
incorporate the prejudices of the researcher. As we know by now, historians
have traditionally felt that this possible bias is a risk worth taking. They are
inclined to examine documents for what they hint at or even do not say as
much as for what they do. Because we are not in a position to undertake field
research on how audiences of the fifties were affected by programs involving
women, let us instead resort to a subjective analysis of television's product
itself and see what its leading characters and dramatic themes reveal.

MALE FRAMES AND FEMALE ENERGIES

The most promising programs for exploring gender issues are the sitcoms of
the 1950s. As we have seen, other genres popular in the 1950s-crime shows,
westerns, and quiz programs-tended to ignore women or place them in
secondary roles. A majority of the sitcoms, however, take place in a domes­
tic setting in which women are central figures. The plots regularly turn on
misunderstandings between men and women over their relationships or the
proper definition of gender roles. As a consequence, of all television pro­
grams, sitcoms had the most formative influence on the image of women.
As a genre, sitcoms had their roots in radio shows like The Jack Benny
Program, The Burns and Allen Show, and Amos 'n' Andy.* That origin helps
explain why comedy in television shows came to be more verbal than com­
edy in film, which blended physical and verbal humor. Sitcoms derived most
of their laughs from puns, repartee, or irony. What the camera added were
close-ups and reaction shots, since the small television screen limited the
detail that could be shown. Tight focus revealed the visual delivery comedi­
ans often achieved through subtle gestures: a raised eyebrow, a curled lip, or
a frown. "You know what your mother said the day we were married, Alice?"
grumps the obese Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners. [A close-up, here,

* Amos 'n' Andy, a show about a taxicab company operated by blacks, presented a special crossover

problem. The white actors who starred in the show on radio were hardly appropriate for a visual
medium.
3 56 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

for emphasis; the double-chin juts in disdain.] "You know what she said? I'm
not losing a daughter; I'm gaining a ton." Or another time, when Ralph's
vanity gets the better of him, he brags, "Alice, when I was younger, the girls
crowded around me at the beach." "Of course, Ralph," replies Alice. "That's
because they wanted to sit in the shade." [Cut to Ralph's bulging eyes.]
From the historian's point of view, the more intriguing sitcoms are not the
predictable ones, such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows
Best, but those that do not seem to fit the standard mold. It is here-where
the familiar conventions come closest to being broken-that the tensions
and contradictions of the genre appear most clearly. In different ways, Our
Miss Brooks, I Love Lucy, and The Honeymooners all feature unconventional
characters and unusual plot situations. Our Miss Brooks stars Eve Arden as an
aging, unmarried schoolteacher whose biting humor makes her a threat to
the bumbling men around her. I Love Lucy, with Lucille Ball, follows the zany
attempts of Lucy Ricardo to break out of her narrow domesticity into the
larger world of show business or into some moneymaking venture. Although
the Ricardos had a child midway through the series, he was not often fea­
tured in the show. The Honeymooners was perhaps the most offbeat sitcom
of the fifties. It featured the blue-collar world of the Kramdens, a child­
less couple who lived in a dreary Brooklyn flat with their neighbors Ed and
Trixie Norton, also childless. Ralph, a bus driver, and Ed, a sewer worker,
seem unlikely subjects to reinforce the middle-class values of Friedan's femi­
nine mystique. Despite their unusual formats, all three sitcoms were among
the most popular shows of the fifties, and Lucy stayed at the top of the rat­
ings for almost the entire decade. By looking at these sitcoms, we can better
understand on what basis a show could deviate from traditional formats and
still remain successful.
As it happens, none of these shows is as exceptional as it might first seem.
All incorporate elements of the traditional family-show structure, with
male authority remaining dominant, middle-class values applauded, and the
proper order of society prevailing by the end of each episode. Still, there
is more to them than the simple triumph of the feminine mystique. The
three leading female characters-Connie Brooks, Lucy Ricardo, and Alice
Kramden-reveal through the force of their comic personas certain tensions
that conventional plot resolutions cannot hide. Each series offers glimpses of
women's discontent as well as women able to cope with adversity.
The comic tensions in Our Miss Brooks arise from two primary sources:
Miss Brooks constantly clashes with her authoritarian principal, Osgood
Conklin, and at the same time has her amorous eye on the biology teacher,
Mr. Boynton. Boynton seems oblivious to her sexual overtures yet is the best
prospect to save her from spinsterhood. In one show she walks in with her
arms full of packages. "Can I hold something?" he asks. "Sure, as soon as I
put these packages down," she cracks, though he chooses not to notice.
Miss Brooks is oppressed on several levels. She recognizes that society
places little value on her role as a teacher. There is no future in her job,
where she is bullied, exploited, and underpaid. Marriage offers the only way
 From Rosie to Lucy 3 57

out, but since she is superior in intellect and personality to the men and no
longer young and fresh, her prospects are dim. Thus she faces a future in
which she cannot fulfill her femininity. Her only hope is to use her wiles to
trick Mr. Boynton into marriage. She must be passive-aggressive, because
convention prevents her from taking overt initiatives. At the same time, she
must accept a career situation that is beneath her talents. Rather than chal­
lenge the system that demeans her, she survives by treating it as comical and
transcending it through the force of her superior character.
In the first episode of the series, Miss Brooks determines to arouse
Mr. Boynton's romantic interest by starting a fight. That leads to a number
of laughs as Mr. Boynton ducks each provocation. Before she makes head­
way, she is called on the carpet by Mr. Conklin, the principal. From behind
his desk, Conklin radiates authority, glowering at her and treating her with
disdain. But Miss Brooks hardly folds before the onslaught. She tricks him
into reminiscing about his youth,
and as he becomes more mel­ Male hierarchy is reestablished in the
low (and human), she assumes
end, hut before order returns, we have
greater familiarity, until she is
sitting casually on the corner of
had a glimpse ofa world in which
his desk. By the end of the meet­ women have power.
ing, Connie has sent Mr. Conklin
on a wild-goose chase that leads to his arrest by the police. In his absence,
she becomes acting principal, clearly relishing the sense of authority she gains
from holding the seat of power, having subverted the duly constituted author­
ity. Of course, male hierarchy is reestablished in the end, but before order
returns, we have had a glimpse of a world in which women have power.
The liberties taken in the show, however, amount to scarcely more than
shore leave. A traditional sense of domestic order underlies the surface may­
hem. Even though the central characters are unmarried, the show does have a
surrogate family structure. Despite her relatively advanced age, Miss Brooks's
real role is that of a smart-talking teenage daughter. She lives in an apart­
ment with a remarkably maternal housekeeper. One of the students at school,
Walter (an essential nerd), serves as a surrogate son, while Mr. Conklin,
of course, is the father figure. That leaves Mr. Boynton to be paired off as
Miss Brooks's reticent steady. Her challenges to Mr. Conklin's male authority
are allowed only because the principal is pompous, arbitrary, and occasion­
ally abusive of his position. And Mr. Boynton is scarcely as dumb as he acts;
indeed, at the end of the first episode, as Miss Brooks waits eagerly for a kiss
that will demonstrate his interest, he holds back and winks at the audience­
indicating that he can dish it out too. With Mr. Conklin back in charge and
Mr. Boynton clearly in control, the male frame is reestablished. Miss Brooks
has been chastened for her presumption, and the normal, male-dominated
order has been restored.
Similar tensions operate in the I Love Lucy show. Lucy's efforts to escape
the confines of domesticity threaten her husband, Ricky, and the well-being
of the family. The plot generally thickens as Lucy cons her neighbor Ethel
358 Arn:R THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

ii

..... .- ".

Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) and Lucy (Lucille Ball) look on as Ricky Ricardo (Desi
Amaz) and Fred Mertz (William Frawley) react with shock to yet another oftheir
schemes, this time to spend more time with their husbands by playing golf together.
The women chose old-fuhioned golf clothing, because they knew next to nothing about
the game. Costuming was one of many recurring devices the show employed to develop
storylines. Notice how Ricky and Fred use their eyes to express shock. Such small facial
gestures were a common way in which early television achieved comic effects.

Mertz into joining her escapades. Ethel and Lucy then become rivals of their
husbands. In an episode that could have generated biting commentary, Lucy
and Ethel challenge Fred Mertz and Ricky to exchange their jobs for domes­
ticity. The women will be the breadwinners, the men the housekeepers.
Both, of course, prove equally inept in the others' domain. Ethel and Lucy,
once they discover they have no significant job skills, end up working in a
chocolate factory. Their boss is a woman who is far more domineering and
arbitrary than Mr. Conklin ever was. In a parody of Charlie Chaplin's Mod­
ern Times, Lucy and Ethel fall hopelessly behind as they pack candies that run
relentlessly along a conveyor belt. They stuff their pockets and their mouths
until they are sick and the floor is heaped with fallen candies. By the end of
the day they return home emotionally drained, humbled, and thwarted.
In the meantime, Ricky and Fred have virtually destroyed the apartment.
How much rice do they need for dinner? They decide on several pounds, so
that the kitchen is soon awash. Just as Ethel and Lucy are relieved to return
 From Rosie to Lucy 3 59

home, Fred and Ricky are overjoyed to escape the toils of domestic life. Each
side learns to respect the difficulties facing the other.
Despite the schmaltzy ending, there is a real tension in the structure of
this episode and the series as a whole. Within the orthodox framework (Lucy
and Ricky are firmly middle class, worrying about money, friends, schools,
and a house in the suburbs), the energy and spark of the show comes pre­
cisely because Lucy, like Miss Brooks, consistently refuses to recognize the
male limits prescribed for her. Although Ricky manages to rein her in by the
end of each episode, the audience realizes full well that she is too restless, too
much restricted by four walls and a broom, and far too vivacious to accept
the cult of domesticity. She will be off and running again the following week
in another attempt to break loose.*
More than any other sitcom of the fifties, The Honeymooners seems to
deviate from middle-American stereotypes. As lower-class, childless couples
living in stark apartments, the Nortons and Kramdens would scarcely seem
ideal reflections of an affluent, family-centered society. Ralph and Alice
struggle to get by on his $67 .50-a-week salary as a bus driver. Sewer worker
Ed Norton and his wife, Trixie, live off credit. Whenever their appliances or
furniture are repossessed, Ed replaces them with merchandise from another
store. The show's main set is the Kramden's living room-cum-kitchen, with
no television set, telephone, vacuum cleaner, or other modern appliances.
They have only a bureau, a table and chairs, a standing sink, an icebox (liter­
ally), and a stove.
The show turns on Ralph's obsession with money and status. He is forever
trying to get rich quick, earn respect, and move up in the world. All that
saves him from himself and disaster is Alice's stoic forbearance. She has had
to live through all his efforts to assert his authority-"I'm the boss, Alice,
and don't you ever forget it!"-and
to resist his harebrained schemes
In no other show do the characters
(diet pizza parlors, wallpaper that
so regularly lay marriage, ego, or
glows in the dark to save electric­
ity). And it is Alice who cushions his livelihood on the line.
fall when each new dream turns to
ashes. Like most middle-class American couples, Ralph and Alice bicker over
money. Ralph is a cheapskate, not by nature but to mask his failure as a bread­
winner. Alice must use her feminine wiles to persuade him to buy anything,

*The show's most successful moment might also serve as a model of 1950s family life. In its early
years, television honored all the middle-class sexual mores. Even married couples slept in separate
beds, and the word preg;nant was taboo (since it implied that a couple had been sexually active-at
least once). The producers of Lucy thus faced a terrible dilemma when they learned that their star was
indeed with child. What to do? They made the bold decision to incorporate Lucille Ball's pregnancy
into the show. For months, television audiences watched Lucy become bigger and more uncomfort­
able. On January 19, 1953, the big day arrived. The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital" (filmed
earlier in anticipation of the blessed event) scored the highest rating (68.8 percent) of any show of
the decade. In newspaper headlines, news of the birth of Desi Arnazjr. rivaled the inauguration of
Dwight D. Eisenhower, which occurred the following morning.
3 60 Alr:rER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

In a typical scene from The HuneymofllU'fS, Ralph Kram den Uackie Gleason)
adopts a pompous pose before his skeptical wife, Alice (Audrey Meadows), and her
anxious friend Trixie Norton (Joyce Randolph), while his friend Ed Norton (Art
Camey) looks on with bug-eyed disbelief. Inevitably, Ralph's confidence shattered
in the face of his bungling attempts to get rich qui� leaving Alice to pick up the
pieces and put him back together again.

even a television or a telephone. To protect his pride, Ralph accuses her of

being a spendthrift. Their battles have far more bite than those seen in any
other sitcom of that era. In no other show do the characters so regularly lay
marriage, ego, or livelihood on the line.
Why, then, did the audience like this show? For one thing, it is very
funny. Ed Norton's deadpan is a perfect foil to Ralph's manic intensity. It
is a delight to watch Norton take forever to shuffle a deck of cards while
Ralph does a slow burn. And Alice's alternately tolerant and spirited rejoin­
ders complete the chemistry. In addition, there is a quality to the Kram­
dens' apartment that separates it in time and space from the world in which
middle-class viewers live. The mass audience is more willing to confront
serious questions if such issues are raised in distant times or places. Death on
a western does not have the same implications as a death on Lassie. Divorce
for Henry vm is one thing; even a hint of it for Ozzie and Harriet would
be too shocking to contemplate. Thus the depression look of the Kramdens'
aparnnent gives the audience the spatial and temporal distance it needs to
separate itself from the sources of conflict that regularly trouble Ralph and
 From Rosie to Lucy 361

Alice. The audience can look on with a sense of its material and social supe­
riority as Alice and Ralph go at it:

RALPH: You want this place to be Disneyland.

AL1cE: This place is a regular Disneyland. You see out there, Ralph? The
back of the Chinese restaurant, old man Grogan's long underwear on
the line, the alley? That's my Fantasyland. You see that sink over there?
That's my Adventureland. The stove and the icebox, Ralph, that's
Frontierland. The only thing that's missing is the World of Tomorrow.
RALPH (doing his slow burn): You want Tomorrowland, Alice? You want
Tomorrowland? Well, pack your bags, because you're going to the moon!
[Menaces her with his raised :fist.]*

Underneath its blue-collar veneer, The Honeymooners is still a middle-class

family sitcom. Alice and Trixie don't have children; they have Ralph and
Ed. In one episode Trixie says to Alice, "You know those men we're mar­
ried to? You have to treat them like children." Reversal of social class roles
makes this arrangement work without threatening the ideal of male author­
ity. Because the middle classes have always
equated the behavior of the poor with that of "Baby, you 're the greatest. "
children-and Ralph and Ed are poor-no
one is surprised by their childish antics. Trixie and Alice, both having mar­
ried beneath their social status, maintain middle-class standards. At the end
of almost every episode, Alice brings Ralph back into the fold after one of his
schemes fails. Surrounding her in an embrace, he rewards her with his puppy
dog devotion: "Baby, you're the greatest."
One episode in particular reveals the price Alice paid to preserve her man/
child, marriage, and selfhood. A telegram arrives announcing, "I'm coming to
visit. Love, Mom." Ralph explodes at the idea of sharing his apartment with
his dreaded mother-in-law. Whenever she visits, she showers him with criti­
cisms that wound his brittle pride. After numerous jokes at Ralph's expense,
along with some cutting commentary on mothers-in-law, Ralph moves in
upstairs with the Nortons. There he provokes a similar fight between Ed
and Trixie. But just as this upheaval threatens the domestic order, marriage
and family prevail over wounded pride. Kicked out by the Nortons, Ralph
returns home, only to discover that "Mom" is Mother Kramden. Alice, of
course, has welcomed her with the very warmth Ralph denies Alice's mother.
Alice's generosity of spirit once again reduces him to a shamefaced puppy.
This victory is so complete that it threatens to destroy Alice's relationship
with Ralph. Any pretense of masculine authority has been laid to ruin. As
if to soften the blow to Ralph's pride, Alice sits down to deliver her victory
speech. She lowers her eyes, drops her shoulders, and speaks in tones of
resignation rather than triumph. The episode ends as she reads a letter that

*Similarly, a show like M*A*S*H could more easily explore topical issues such as racism because it
was set in Korea, not the United States, and in the 1950s, not the present, even though the issues
were contemporary.
3 62 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

describes mothers-in-law as having the "hardest job in the world." Ironi­

cally, the letter is one Ralph wrote fifteen years earlier to Alice's mother.
The sentiments expressed are so sappy that they virtually undercut the com­
edy. Like Ralph, the producers must have thought it better to eat crow than
leave a residue of social criticism. Their material had been so extreme, the
humor so sharp, and the mother-in-law jokes so cruel that they threatened
middle-American values.
Even after its apology, the show ends with a disturbing image. Mother
Kramden has gone off to "freshen up." A penitent Ralph admits his defeat,
then announces he is going out for some air-in essence, to pull himself
back together. But what of Alice? She is left alone in her kitchen, holding
nothing more than she had before-dominion over her dreary world. While
Ralph can escape, if only briefly, Alice's domestic role requires her to stay
with Ralph's mother. For Alice, there is no escape. When the show ends, she
is no better off than before the battle began. Her slumped posture suggests
that she understands all too well the hollowness of her triumph. We must
believe that many women in videoland identified with Alice.
The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and Our Miss Brooks all suggest that while
the male characters in the series maintain their ultimate authority, the
"symbolic annihilation" of women that Gaye Tuchman spoke of is, in these
comedies at least, not total. A battle between the sexes would not be funny
unless the two sides were evenly matched; and setting sitcoms in the domes­
tic sphere placed women in a better position to spar. Further, although men
had an advantage through social position, rank, and authority, women like
Miss Brooks, Lucy, and Alice vied on equal terms. The authority that men
assumed through male hierarchy, these women radiated through the sheer
strength of their comedic personalities. The producers, of course, were
not closet feminists in permitting this female assertiveness to occur; they
simply recognized that the female characters accounted for much of their
shows' popularity. And the shows' ratings were high, we would argue, partly
because they hinted at the discontent many women felt, whether or not they
recognized the strength of their feelings.
If that conclusion is correct, it suggests that neither the reflective hypoth­
esis nor the manipulative hypothesis explains how the mass media shape
popular culture. At bottom, the extreme forms of each explanation slight one
of the constants in historical explanation: change over time. If the mass com­
munications industries simply reflected public taste and never influenced it,
they would become nonentities-multibillion-dollar ciphers with no causal
agency. All change would be the consequence of other historical factors. On
the other hand, if we assign a role to the media that's too manipulative, we
find it difficult to explain any change at all. As agencies of cultural hege­
mony, the media could stifle any attempt to change the status quo. How
was it, then, that millions of girls who watched themselves being symboli­
cally annihilated during the fifties supplied so many converts to the women's
movement of the sixties?
 From Rosie to Lucy 3 63

Perhaps the mass media, although influential in modern society, are

not as monolithic in outlook as they sometimes seem. A comparison to the
medieval church is apt, so long as we remember that the church, too, was
hardly able to impose its will universally. Even where orthodoxy reigned,
schismatic movements were always springing up. Today's heretics may be
feminists rather than Anabaptists, but they are nonetheless responding to
growing pressures within society. From a feminist point of view, we have
not automatically achieved utopia merely because television since the 1980s
has regularly presented sitcoms and dramas with women as their central
characters. We should remember that the same mass culture industry that
threatened women with symbolic annihilation also published The Feminine
Mystique.
364 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Additional Reading

This chapter draws on material from three different fields-women's his­

tory, social history and popular culture, and the history of television. For
overviews of the image of women in our culture, see Lois Banner, American
Beaut:y (New York, 1983); Ann Douglas, The Feminization ofAmerican Cul­
ture (New York, 1977); and Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New
York, 1974). Haskell's study of the image of women in movies confirms what
we learn from examining other areas of popular culture. A most intriguing
strategy for decoding gender signs in the mass media is Erving Goffman,
Gender Advertisements (New York, 1976).
For readers more concerned with the feminist movement and women's
history, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963), is one place
to start. Her book retains the vitality that spurred its wide popularity and
remains an interesting social history of the 1950s. Friedan, however, has
argued for what one feminist critic described as a declensionist view of wom­
en's situation. She believed that between the 1930s and the 1950s, women
had lost status and opportunity. Joanne Myerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver:
Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia, 1994), finds
more continuity than decline. A series of scholars offer evidence of success­
ful, engaged women who defy the stereotype Friedan established. Friedan's
political activism is the subject of Susan Oliver, Bett:y Friedan: The Personal Is
Political (New York, 2007). Daniel Horowitz, Bett:y Friedan and the Making of
"The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Femi­
nism (Amherst, 2000), connects her to the progressive politics of her youth
and links to American Communists. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How
the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: 2000), covers
the roots of feminism in the 1950s. The explosion of thinking and writing in
women's history makes it impossible to mention more than a few valuable
studies. The historian who looks at both television and feminism is Susan
Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New
York, 1995). Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has been a leader among women his­
torians; her article "The New Woman and New History," Feminist Studies 3
(1975-1976): 185-198, offers useful perspectives.
As we mentioned, historians have not written extensively about televi­
sion. A good starting point is Gary Edgerton, The Columbia History ofAmeri­
can Television (New York, 2009), a comprehensive guide to all facets from
programming to technology. James Roman, From Daytime to Prime Time: A
History ofAmerican Television Programing (Santa Barbara, CA, 2007), gives a
picture of evolving content. Eric Barnouw's Tube ofPlent:y (New York, 1990)
is a pioneering work in broadcast history. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on
TV: The Visual Culture ofEveryday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA, 1994),
has taken up the topic of this chapter. A couple of collections of essays are
quite interesting: John O'Connor, ed., American History, American Television
 From Rosie to Lucy 3 65

(New York, 198 3 ) and Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cul­
,

tural Form (New York, 197 5), have some of the most interesting insights
into the evolution of television and its impact on society.
CHAPTER I5

Sitting-In

Civil rights protests erupted all over the South in 1960 after four
black students sat-in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North
Carolina. Was this a spontaneous act born offrustration, or were
larger forces at work?

Joseph McNeil felt hunger pangs as he stepped off the bus at Union Sta­
tion in Greensboro, North Carolina. He received little comfort from the
food counter, however: he was black, this was 1960, and across the South
rigid "Jim Crow" lines segregated African Americans in almost all public
places-schools, movie theaters, parks, churches, trains, buses, planes, and,
of course, restaurants. So when McNeil asked for service, he was refused and
returned hungry to his dormitory at North Carolina A&T, an agricultural
and technical college where he was a first-year student. He poured out his
frustration to his roommate, David Richmond. Two other A&T students
from down the hall joined them: Franklin McCain and Ezell Blair Jr., who,
like Richmond, hailed from Greensboro.
The four frequently held bull sessions about college life-the poor food,
quirky professors, and elusive coeds. Often the conversations turned to
indignities large and small that segregation imposed on black people. To
McNeil and his friends, a white person walking down the street had to be
addressed as "Mister," "Miss," or "Mrs." "Whites, on the other hand, called
blacks by their first names or simply as "boy." Facing a bathroom emergency,
they could not enter a lavatory unless it was designated "colored." On city
buses, they still sat in the back, despite the landmark 1954 Supreme Court
ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which rejected the notion of
"separate but equal" segregated facilities-and even after the Court explic­
itly addressed busing in December 1956, affirming Martin Luther King Jr.'s
bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
No doubt McNeil' s most recent humiliation fired up the four friends,
because on this evening their conversation took an unexpected turn. They
had frequently criticized older blacks for passivity in the face of repeated
racial insults. "We constantly heard about all the evils that are occurring
and how blacks are mistreated and nobody is doing anything about it,"
Richmond recalled. "We used to question, '"Why is it that you have to sit

366
 Sitting-In 367

in the balcony? Why do you have to ride in the back of the bus?' " Then
McCain pointed out that they, too, were all talk and no action. The real
question, they agreed, was what should be done to bring an end to Jim
Crow,the system of racial segregation that stigmatized all black Americans
as second-class citizens? More immediately and personally,what were they
going to do about it?
A plan emerged. They decided to ask for service at the lunch counter at
Woolworth's department store.Blacks were encouraged to shop anywhere in
the store yet were allowed to eat only at a stand-up snack bar and bakery coun­
ter. The long L-shaped, stainless-steel lunch counter with cushioned stools
was strictly off-limits.Woolworth's even posted Colored Only and Whites
Only signs until 1958, when Dr. George Simkins, a local African American
dentist and civil rights activist,asked the manager to remove the signs.The
manager agreed, but only because other merchants were removing them as
well.But even when the signs were gone,the lunch counters remained strictly
segregated, so much so that only whites waited on customers, while blacks
stayed in the background,cooking the food and cleaning up.
Simkins understood well the racial politics of Greensboro.The city had
a reputation for its progressive approach to race relations,but Simkins rec­
ognized that city leaders made concessions to the black community only to
avoid a confrontation that might tarnish the city's image. They remained
determined to keep Jim Crow in place. Simkins, chapter president of
the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), was equally determined to end apartheid. In 1955 he had led
three black friends to the first tee of the segregated Gillespie Park Golf
course,a public facility.Local police arrested him,and a judge jailed him for
criminal trespass.
On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, Simkins was seeing patients
when he received word that something big was happening at Woolworth's.
It turned out to be McCain, Blair, McNeil, and Richmond, who had set
out on their mission.McCain,having been to an air force ROTC (Reserve
Officers' Training Corps) class, still wore his uniform. Some people later
thought he was making a patriotic statement, but in truth, the class had
run late,leaving him no time to change.On their way to Woolworth's,the

four passed a shop run by Ralph Johns, a local white business owner who
had long urged blacks to stand up for their rights. They let him know that
they finally had decided to act,and he called the local newspaper.Whatever
outward bravado they displayed,on the inside they were scared. "I can tell
you this," McCain said. "I was fully prepared mentally not to ever come
back to the campus....I thought the worst thing that could happen to us
is we could have had our heads split open with a night stick and hauled into
prison."
Pushing aside those dark thoughts, they pressed on. In the store they
divided into pairs to make purchases-toothpaste, school supplies-that
would establish them as legitimate customers. Then they made their way
to the lunch counter. McCain and McNeil were the first to sit down.
3 68 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

What happened next took them by surprise. Nothing! The waitress at first
ignored them. Geneva Tisdale, a black woman bussing dishes behind the
counter, assumed they were from out of town. "I just thought there was
somebody here from someplace else that didn't know they didn't serve
blacks," she said, "so I kept on doing what I was doing." But when they
tried to order sodas, doughnuts, and coffee, the waitress refused to serve
them. Tisdale called them troublemakers whose actions would damage
race relations.
Manager Charley Harris spoke to them next. His store was one of Wool­
worth's most profitable, and the lunch counter was his biggest moneymaker.
An incident there might drive customers away. Despite his request, the four
politely refused to leave. So off he went to see the local police chief, who
declined to intervene since the four had done nothing disorderly. The chief
did, however, send an officer to keep an eye on the situation. Just as the
students were beginning to doubt their decision to sit-in, an elderly white
woman approached. "Boys, I am just so proud of you," she said. "My only
regret is that you didn't do this 10 or 15 years ago." McCain later recalled,
"That pat on the shoulder meant more to me that day than anything else....
I got so much pride and such a good positive feeling from that little old lady.
I mean, she'll never know it, but that really made the day for us." Harris
then ended the standoff by closing the counter. The "Greensboro Four," as
they would soon be known, told him they would be back. Outside, they ran
into news photographer Jack Moebes, who took their picture walking four
abreast.
The young men returned to the campus without their coffee and dough­
nuts. McCain remembered, "I've never felt so good in my life. I truly felt
as though I had my going-to-the-mountaintop experience." Students on
campus at first refused to believe what they had done. All the same, many
pledged to join the protest. From 11 :00 to 3 :00 the next day, they sat at
the counter, where a number of
hostile whites came by to heckle
"I've never felt so good in my life.
them. Newspaper and television
I truly felt as though I had my going­
reporters also arrived, and when
the news hit the campus, the to-the-mountaintop experience."
response was beyond their wildest
imagining. A&T students greeted them as heroes. The college president,
despite his previous deference to white community leaders, refused demands
that he expel or suspend the demonstrators. All he wanted to know, he asked
wryly, was why the four of them had decided to eat at Woolworth's, since
the food there was no better than the campus cafeteria.
By February 3, a fever gripped the community. Students from other local
colleges soon joined in, and on the fourth day the first white students as well
as high school students sat in with them. Rather than face more demonstra­
tions, Woolworth's closed the lunch counter, but the genie had escaped the
lamp. The Greensboro spirit spilled over to other states and other com­
munities. Cleveland Sellers, who would become a leading student activist,
 Sitting-In 369

The Greensboro Four (from left ro right: David Richmond, Franklin McCain,
Ezell Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil), as photographed by Jack.Moebes as they left
Woolworth's on February 1, 1960.

,,
felt "a shot of adrenaline" that ignited "a burning desire to get involved
when the news reached him in South Carolina. Up in New York City, a
young high school math teacher, Robert Moses, saw news photos of the
four Greensboro students exhibiting a defiance rare among southern blacks.
Within months, Moses had headed south to join the student movement,
and Sellers was leading a protest in Denmark, South Carolina. In Nashville,
Tennessee, another group of students, who had already staged sit-ins the
previous fall, sensed their time had come. So did students such as Lonnie
King and Julian Bond in Atlanta, Georgia. When King saw the headlines
from Greensboro, he shoved the paper in front of Bond and said, "Don't
you think it ought to happen here?" Soon enough it did.
In February alone, students held sit-ins at lunch counters in eleven cit­
ies in North Carolina, seven in Virginia, four in South Carolina, three in
Florida, two in Tennessee, one in Kentucky, and one in Maryland. Over
time the circle of protest widened to Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas,
370 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

West Virginia, and even Ohio. Established civil rights organizations such
as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
seemed as much surprised by this eruption of protests as the local authori­
ties who opposed them. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rushed an
organizer to the area, and some local chapters of the NAACP provided legal
counsel and bail bond money, but the national NAACP often urged protest­
ers to show more restraint. Its Legal Defense Fund at first refused to provide
funds for jailed student protesters.
And jailed many were. In Raleigh, North Carolina, police arrested forty­
one students at the Cameron Village Woolworth's. Nashville police arrested
eighty-one student protesters, even though they behaved with courtesy
and were committed to nonviolence. Whites who harassed them were not
arrested. Most authorities assumed that the stigma of being jailed would sti­
fle further protest and were thus surprised when many demonstrators chose
jail rather than paying a fine. "Jail-ins" added another weapon to the protest­
ers' arsenal. Even more surprising to authorities, the often-cautious lead­
ers of the local black communities, whatever their initial reservations, threw
their support behind the students.
In Nashville, where the Reverend James Lawson had been training stu­
dents in the practices of nonviolent protest, the Greensboro sit-ins took
civil rights organizers by surprise. That Friday, February 5, they held a
mass meeting to plan local actions. Lawson urged students to move slowly.
Few had received adequate training, he warned, and the local affiliate of
the SCLC had less than $90 available for bail, once the police started to
make arrests. The students insisted that, ready or not, it was time to act.
As nineteen-year-old theology student James Bevel put it, "I'm sick and
tired of waiting." Whatever their reservations, local black community
leaders threw their wholehearted support behind the students. The Rev­
erend Kelly Miller Smith opened the doors of the First Baptist Church to
public meetings. Lawson provided a crash course in the tactics of nonvio­
lent protest. Within several days, the local SCLC chapter raised $40,000
for bail. Many people put up homes and businesses as security for the bail
fund. All fourteen local black lawyers offered free legal services. As Rever­
end Smith explained, "We had just launched out on something that looked
perfectly crazy and scores of people were being arrested, and paddy wag­
ons were full and people downtown couldn't understand what was going
on, people just welcoming being arrested, that ran against everything they
had ever seen."
First Greensboro, then Raleigh and Durham, then Nashville, and then
all over the South. McCain, Richmond, McNeil, and Blair had let loose an
avalanche. By the end of May, businesses in Nashville had accepted an inte­
gration plan. Greensboro took a bit longer, but there, too, stores opened
their lunch counters to black customers. And the momentum did not stop
with Greensboro. Student protesters gave the civil rights movement new
energy and an urgency that culminated first in major civil rights legislation
and eventually in the demand for "black power."
 Sitting-In 3 71

Looking back almost fifty years later, what should historians make of this
extraordinary string of events? How did the decision of four young men,
made in a late-night dormitory bull session, explode into a national crusade
that transformed the civil rights movement? In an article he wrote for Harp­
er's magazine in 1960, Louis Lomax, an African American journalist and
early historian of the civil rights movement, offered an explanation for the
impact of Greensboro. "Negroes all over America," he observed, "knew . . .
that the spontaneous and uncorrelated student demonstrations were more
than an attack on segregation: they were proof that the Negro leadership
class, epitomized by the National Association for the Advancement of Col­
ored People, was no longer the prime mover of the Negro's social revolt."
In that statement, Lomax made two major points about the Greensboro
sit-ins: first that they were spontaneous-determined by the unprompted
decision McNeil, Richmond, Blair, and McCain made to take action; and
second, that they shifted the leadership and strategy in the civil rights move­
ment away from traditional organizations to students. Civil rights veteran
James Farmer reached a similar conclusion: "At long last after decades of
acceptance, four freshman students at North Carolina A&T went into
Woolworth and at the lunch counter they 'sat-in.' " Many historians agreed
with Lomax. Howard Zinn, for example, wrote that "spontaneity and self­
sufficiency were the hallmarks of the sit-ins; without adult advice or consent,
the students planned and carried them through." As one college history text
asserted, "The courage of the students transformed the civil rights move­
ment. Their activism emboldened black adults to voice their dissatisfaction,
and it brought young African Americans a new sense of self-respect."

CONTINUITY VERSUS DISCONTINUITY

At heart, history as a discipline studies change over time. Historians rou­
tinely seek to explain why change occurs where and when it does and why
it occurs in the particular way it does. So an event that appears to move
history in new directions attracts close attention. Readers of this book have
already encountered numerous events that transformed society, whether a
trial of two relatively unknown anarchists for bank robbery, the dropping
of two bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, or the writing of The
Feminine Mystique. Such an event or moment constitutes what is popularly
called a "tipping point" or a "watershed." Once John Brown attacked Harp­
er's Ferry, the rush to civil war became irresistible. The decision to drop the
atom bomb led to a nuclear arms race. Why is it, historians want to know,
that in the steady flow of time some events are so much more consequential
than others?
In their study of the past, historians generally gravitate toward one of two
camps: those who see the past as a continuous flow with occasional pools
and eddies and those who see the past as punctuated by periodic torrents,
during which the ties between past and present are largely severed. As a
shorthand we could label them the "continuity" and "discontinuity" schools,
372 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

except at this level of abstraction the division amounts to less of a school

than an instinctive disposition brought to the way one analyzes trends and
events. Those in the continuity school tend to emphasize the links between
major watershed moments and the events that precede them. They explain
the volume of water at a falls by following the river upstream to locate the
tributaries that turn what was once a brook into a river.
Many chapters in this book make the case for continuity. In analyzing the
role of The Jungle in the controversy over tainted meat, we suggested that no
matter how much Upton Sinclair shocked the nation, previous scandals had
prepared the public to believe the worst of the meatpackers. And Theodore
Roosevelt, in his ambition to increase the regulatory authority of the gov­
ernment, used the furor over The Jungle toward ends previously championed
by a large and varied group of Progressive reformers.
The explanation of Greensboro offered by Louis Lomax and echoed by
Howard Zinn emphasizes discontinuity, and historians who gravitate in this
direction find much to work with in breakout events characterized as revo­
lutions, whether they be political in nature (e.g., the French and Russian
revolutions) or more intellectual or social (the scientific and industrial revo­
lutions). With revolutions, old structures collapse, new authorities arise, and
discredited ideas and values make way for new ones. Thus, when Lomax,
Zinn, and others called the sit-ins spontaneous, they were suggesting that
the four young men acted independently of and largely without consultation
with any organized movement.
Certainly the chain of events following the Greensboro protest redirected
the civil rights movement into a more confrontational phase, in which the
young and especially students took the lead. In the wake of the Woolworth's
sit-ins came the creation of the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinat­
ing Committee (SNCC-pronounced snick), the Freedom Rides of 1961,
James Meredith's integration of
the University of Mississippi in
Without Greensboro, the civil rights
1962, student voter-registration
drives during the Mississippi
movement would not have happened
Freedom Summer of 1964, and when it did and in the way that it did.
ultimately the rise of the Black
Power movement. The increasing level of confrontation increased pressure
on the system of racial segregation. It pushed President John Kennedy to
introduce a civil rights bill in 1963; it prodded Martin Luther King to orga­
nize the March on Washington in August of that year, and Lyndon Johnson
to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965). Hence,
the Greensboro sit-ins, historian William Chafe argued, would qualify as a
watershed moment in the history of American racial politics. The movement
might well have changed direction without Greensboro, but it certainly
would not have happened when it did and in the way that it did without it.
Considerable evidence supports the Lomax-Zinn notion that the Greens­
boro sit-in was a "spontaneous" event. To begin with, none of the four cen­
tral participants had been civil rights activists before they decided to act. In
 Sitting-In 3 73

their late-night bull sessions, they were just as likely to question whether
moral man should act against injustice as to debate over race and social activ­
ism. In that sense, they were armchair philosophers, like so many first-year
college students. But the insult at the Greensboro bus terminal got under
McNeil's skin. On the Sunday night that he returned to the dorm hungry,
he said to his friends, "It's time we take some action now." What would they
do? McCain remembered that they had no name for their tactic-they did
not consider it a "sit-in" or "sit-down"-they just planned to go ask to be
served. No one expected they would be; they just planned to order and stay
put. As Ezell Blair commented, "Well, you know that might be weeks, that
might be months, that might be never."
And why Woolworth's? None of the four had a special grievance against
the chain store; it was simply a prominent local business and, they felt, a
proper target. "They advertise in the public media, newspapers, radio, tele­
vision, that sort of thing," McCain later explained. "They tell you to come
in. 'Yes, buy the toothpaste; yes, come in and buy the notebook paper."'
Once blacks made their purchases, their money mingled in the cash register
with white money. But sit down with white people at the lunch counter?
"Never." "The whole system, of course, was unjust," McCain noted, "but
that just seemed like insult added to injury." So when the waitress told them,
"I'm sorry, we don't serve you here," they replied, "We just beg to disagree
with you. We've in fact already been served," referring to their recent pur­
chases. "We wonder why you'd invite us in to serve us at one counter and
deny service at another."
Further evidence suggests that McCain and his friends had no notion
they were starting a movement. Although all four participated in civil rights
events on campus after the sit-in, they did not become activists after col­
lege. Ezell Blair spent a year in law school before moving to Boston, where
he worked with the developmentally disabled, became a member of the
New England Islamic Center, and took the name Jibreel Khazan. Franklin
McCain became a chemist and then an executive for the Celanese Corpora­
tion. Joseph McNeil served as an officer in the air force before working for
IBM and later the :financial-services industry on Wall Street. David Rich­
mond stayed around Greensboro as a community counselor and died from
lung cancer at the age of 49. No matter how much they resented the injus­
tices of Jim Crow in 1960, the Greensboro Four did not make the movement
they inspired the focus of their adult lives.

THE CASE FOR CONTINUITY

So a case can be made for "spontaneity" and discontinuity. Still, the context
sketched thus far has centered mostly on the conversations these four men
held in their first-year dorm. But what happens if we dig a little deeper into
the influences on their lives before freshman year? First, three of the four
students (McNeil was the exception) grew up in Greensboro and attended
segregated Dudley High School. The teaching staff contained a number of
3 74 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

civil rights activists, including Nell Coley, an English teacher who preached
racial pride to her students. The curriculum included the literature and his­
tory of black protest. Ezell Blair remembered particularly the impact of
Langston Hughes's poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which proudly
evoked his African heritage:

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to
New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Joseph McNeil grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, but he, too, had
teachers who were "dynamic and straightforward [and] who would tell you
what your rights were as citizens, what you should have, what you don't
have, how you're going to get them."
School was not the only place where these four heard the message of civil
rights. Blair and Richmond attended Shiloh Baptist Church, where Pastor
Otis Hairston recruited members for the NAACP. They also belonged to
the local NAACP youth group that met in churches and on college cam­
puses in the area. At meetings, they discussed protest activities both in
Greensboro and across the South. The 195 5 Montgomery bus boycott had
inspired intense discussions that, as one participant recalled, "started a whole
lot of things rolling." Martin Luther King also left his mark when he came
to Greensboro in 1958. The president of North Carolina A&T, fearing
that King was too controversial, refused to make the school's auditorium
available. Willa Player, president
of nearby Bennett College, had no
"This is a liberal ans college where
such reservation. As head of a pri­
freedom rings-so Manin Luther
vate women's college, Bennett was
less vulnerable to reprisal from state King can speak here. "
officials. But Player also made her
decision as an educator, saying "this is a liberal arts college where freedom
rings-so Martin Luther King can speak here." Blair heard King's sermon.
He recalled it as "so strong that I could feel my heart palpitating. It brought
tears to my eyes."
Those at A&T who knew the four young men found Blair an unlikely
person to launch a social movement. Where Franklin McCain was a large,
imposing figure and McNeil, a physics major, was brainy, Blair was physically
small and struck his friends as the "little brother" type. But Blair came from
a home that resonated with civil rights consciousness. His father, Ezell Blair
Sr., taught shop at Dudley High School and was a central figure among local
 Sitting-In 3 75

civil rights activists. In 1957, when Greensboro adopted a strategy of token

integration, it earned a reputation as a symbol of the "New South, astir with
new liberalism," as Newsweek put it. Blair senior sized up the Greensboro
integration plan for the charade that it was. "The white power structure was
trying to appease ...,"he noted, "so they could call Greensboro 'the Gate­
way City,' an all-American city-and they got it."
Two years later, as an NAACP member, Blair senior sparked an initiative
to pressure merchants in a new shopping center to make "nontraditional"
jobs (clerks rather than janitors) available to blacks. Then in 1959 he did
something quite extraordinary-he briefly integrated the lunch counter at
Woolworth's-the very one where his son would sit-in two months later.
He had spent the day at Greensboro's Christmas parade.His daughter (who
was with him) was hungry, he was tired, and they were in front of Wool­
worth's. So they went in and sat down at the counter. One of his students,
who happened to be working that day, thought of Mr. Blair as "the type of
teacher that when he asked you to do something you did it." So when he
asked for sandwiches, she delivered them, even though she knew full well
the store didn't serve blacks. After all, she was black herself. An assistant
store manager immediately came over and directed the Blairs to the stand­
up counter. Blair assured him they were "doing just fine"where they were,
and they finished their sandwiches before leaving.
What Blair did was certainly confrontational, but it was an isolated inci­
dent observed by few people. Nor did he repeat the gesture in a more politi­
cal context, as his son would soon do. However, the experience may explain
why on the night of January 31, as the Greensboro Four planned their sit-in,
they went to the Blairs' to discuss the idea with Ezell's father. He had not
encouraged them, since he doubted their request for service would accom­
plish much.He only said, "If that's the way you feel, go ahead."
Blair Senior was not the only adult with whom the four shared their plan.
Recall that on their way to Woolworth's they stopped to speak to Ralph
Johns, a white shop owner. Why Johns? "Ruffles"Johns, as he was some­
times known, was no ordinary southern shopkeeper. As the son of Syrian
immigrants, he knew firsthand from growing up in Pennsylvania steel towns
what discrimination felt like. He arrived in Greensboro as a soldier during
World War II and stayed on when he married a local woman. His father­
in-law ran a small clothing store that had a largely black clientele.Johns
soon gained a reputation as "a nigger lover"after he joined the NAACP and
began to encourage local college students to challenge Jim Crow. An ever­
changing sign in front of his store advertised his views: "God hates seg­
regation," it might say one day; "Colored and white fountains are not the
way of God or of Christians,"it announced another. In 1949 Johns encour­
aged an A&T football player to challenge the segregated lunch counter at
Woolworth's. The student was dumbfounded. "Man, what do you want to
do? Get me arrested? All I want to do is get my diploma and get out of the
South."
3 76 AFTER TBE FACT: THE ART OF Hl:STOBICAL DETECTION

Ralph "RufBes,, Johns, the

sonof Syrian immigrants,
understood prejudice. & a
Greensboro businessman,
he urged black. students to
fight against segregation.

Johns never gave up the dream of living in an integrated community. He

continued to urge area college students to confront the hypocrisy at Wool­
worth's. Among those he encouraged was Joseph McNeil, whom he thought
was unusually bright and promising.Johns admitted that anyone who carried
out his plan might be arrested, but he was sure that with enough pressure,
Greensboro's stores and restaurants would integrate. He even promised
McNeil money for bail and legal fees. In December 1959 McNeil said he
would do it.Johns, however, was skeptical. He remarked to his clerk, Doro­
thy Graves, "Just like the rest?" and then answered his own question, ''Yeah,
he ain't coming back." But of course, six weeks later McNeil did come back
and brought three friends. Johns coached them in how to act and what to
say and even gave them money to make their purchases. After they left, he
tipped off the reporter at the Greensboro News and Record.
To call the Greensboro sit-ins spontaneous is to ignore Johns's ten-year
effort to integrate Woolworth's and to discount the courageous example set
by George Simkins, Otis Hairston, Willa Player, and nwnerous local lead­
ers like Ezell Blair Sr. The Greensboro Four did not stumble onto the idea
of testing the segregated lunch counter at Woolworth's. Parents, churches,
local civil rights organizations, and civil rights leaders had prepared them to
challenge Jim Crow.

THE BIRTH OF A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Of course, the real significance of the Greensboro sit-ins was not local, but
regional and national. Historians of the civil rights movement generally
agree that the militant phase of nonviolent protest began in earnest only
after Greensboro. It was as if dry tinder had been gathering for years and
Richmond, Blair, McNeil, and McCain struck a match and dropped it into
the pile. The flame that erupted burned across the nation's racial landscape.
Again, the historian wants to know why this match set the movement aflame
 Sitting-In 3 77

rather than the sparks struck earlier. Why February 1960 and not 1957 in
Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine students integrated Central High School?
And why lunch counter sit-ins rather than school or bus desegregation? In
short, why that place, at that time, and in that way?
To explain what differentiated the Greensboro sit-ins from other cam­
paigns that preceded them, we need to consider the nature of social move­
ments: how they begin, why some succeed, why others fail. Why did the
movement choose nonviolent sit-ins rather than petitioning their elected
representatives to change the law? Why do some people join a social move­
ment rather than a political campaign to redress their grievances? To answer
those questions, historians, political scientists, and sociologists alike have
traditionally been drawn to models to explain the rise of social movements.
We have previously discussed models as we explored the decision to drop
the atom bomb at the end of World War IL
According to sociologist Doug McAdam, there are a number of long­
standing theories of movement behavior that might be called the "classi­
cal explanatory models." They vary, but all agree on several central points.
First, they treat American politics as pluralistic. Rejecting the Marxist idea
of power controlled by a relatively small but coherent class of capitalists,
pluralists see power spread among competing groups that occasionally come
together to pursue common interests. "There does not exist a single set of
all-powerful leaders," wrote sociologist Robert Dahl, "who wholly agree on
their major goals and who have enough power to achieve their major goals."
That lack of concentrated power creates a fluid political system in which even
the relatively powerless have an opportunity to promote their ends. Or as
Dahl explained, "whenever a group of people believes that they are adversely
affected by national policies or are about to be, they generally have extensive
opportunities for presenting their case and for negotiations that may produce
a more acceptable alternative." Because groups can resolve their grievances
through normal political channels, they are less likely to resort to violence.
In that way, pluralists explain the relatively peaceful transfer of power within
the American system. Electoral politics provide an effective alternative to
revolution, terrorism, vigilantism, and other forms of violence.
Still, social movements acting outside of the normal political arena are
common in American history. To explain their recurrence, theorists have
added a second dimension to the classical model. A basic causal sequence
describes how such movements arise:

Structural strain -----? disruptive psychological state -----? social movement

"Structural strain" is one way of saying that the basic framework of the social
order is out of joint, and thus a group or groups within society feel threatened
or discontented. The resulting tension leads them into a "disruptive psycho­
logical state" of mind; they sense the need to act but may feel powerless to do
so through normal politics. To make society respond to their sense of griev­
ance, these discontented individuals form a "social movement." The ability
to do so, according to many sociologists, depends on the movement being
3 78 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

organized by people who "feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives
and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem."
Does the classical model help understand how Greensboro affected the
civil rights movement? Certainly, McCain, Richmond, Blair, and McNeil
were aware of widespread discontent with segregation and the racial status
quo in 1960. Indeed, they shared that discontent. So strong was that sense
of injustice (their disruptive state) that they challenged each other to take
action; they initiated a social movement "to redress the problem." Normal
political channels were not open to them. Across the South, few blacks could
vote, almost none held public office, and white leaders made no more than
token concessions. Without resources to redress their grievances, blacks
began to organize a social movement.
But this formulation, altogether too neat, does not really answer our ques­
tions about the why, where, and how of Greensboro. We may know why
these four students acted when they did and why they sat-in at Woolworth's.
But why didn't thousands of other black adults and students act before Feb­
ruary of 1960? Blacks across the South had faced Jim Crow with a mount­
ing sense of grievance for over seventy
years. Neither sit-ins as a tactic, non­
Why didn't thousands of other
violence as a strategy, nor restaurants
black adults and students act
as a target were new in 1960. CORE, a
biracial organization founded in 1942, before February of 1960?
adopted the sit-in during World War
IL After integrating a theatrical performance of Richard Wright's Native Son
in Baltimore, the organization moved on to Stoner's Restaurant in Chicago
in 194 3. When a small group of blacks asked for service, waiters brought food
covered with egg shells and other garbage, but eventually Stoner's decided
to desegregate. Similar efforts succeeded in Denver and Detroit. CORE also
integrated the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. But these were all
places outside the South.
At that time Washington, DC, was largely southern in its orientation,
officially segregated since the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Inspired
by CORE's success, students at Howard University formed the Civil Rights
Committee to picket and sit-in at segregated restaurants. They opposed
discrimination as "contrary to the principles for which the present World
War is being fought" and declared "the effort to end discrimination against
a person because of race or color as a patriotic duty." Their means would
be nonviolent. They would "use dignity and restraint at all times . . . no
matter what the provocation." Outside Thompson's, a moderately priced
restaurant favored by government workers, black and white demonstrators
carried signs declaring, "We die together; let's eat together" and "Are you
for Hitler's way or the American way?" Moved to act, six uniformed black
soldiers and several students entered Thompson's and asked for service. The
military police arrived and requested the soldiers to leave in order to avoid
embarrassment to the army. The soldiers left, but the students stayed. Four
hours later, Thompson's agreed to serve them.
 Sitting-In 3 79

CORE struggled to keep alive the momentum it created during the war.
In April 194 7, the organization sent eight white and eight black men on what
it called a Journey of Reconciliation through Virginia, North Carolina, Ten­
nessee, and Kentucky. Bringing attention to segregation in interstate travel,
the sixteen men were arrested and jailed. They received wide publicity, but
segregation remained firmly in place. CORE faded into the background, as
the socialists, pacifists, and other leftists who dominated its membership fell
under the dark cloud of McCarthyism. Leadership on civil rights passed to
the NAACP and its legal strategy to end segregation. The 1954 decision
in Brown v. Board of Education marked its greatest triumph, as the Supreme
Court overturned the "separate, but equal" policy enshrined since 1895 in
the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Following through on that decision, NAACP
activists like Rosa Parks ignited the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama.
In the midst of that success, a new organization, the Southern Chris­
tian Leadership Conference and its charismatic leader Martin Luther King
Jr., gained new prominence. After 1955, preachers more than lawyers and
church congregations rather than NAACP chapters took the initiative in the
civil rights crusade, at least in the South. Yet despite the efforts of CORE,
the NAACP, and SCLC activists, nothing so broad as a national social move­
ment had emerged by the end of the 1950s. Instead, an array of grassroots
movements revealed a pattern of localized discontent. Two deserve atten­
tion because they help understand why Greensboro transformed civil rights
politics.
Most people think of hardcore segregation in the 1950s in terms of the
Deep South-Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Seldom does Oklahoma
come to mind. However, as we saw in Chapter 12, many Okies arriving in
California pressed local school districts there to segregate the schools. Clara
Luper, sometimes referred to as "the mother of the civil rights movement,"
grew up in the segregated Oklahoma the Okies left behind. As a high school
history teacher, Luper understood that most Americans did not know much
about her state, "because we are a young state and people have not paid
attention to us like they have in other states. We've had lynchings in this
state. We've had burnings. In fact, my building was bombed." She pointed
out that "during the debate on the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, one Senator
stated that Oklahoma had the worst segregation laws in the United States,
which is true."
To make the case for integration, Luper wrote a play honoring Martin
Luther King, entitled Brother President. In 1957 she and a group of students
traveled to New York City to see her play performed. While there, they
experienced a sense of freedom they had never known before. They entered
restaurants and ate at integrated lunch counters. Returning home through
the Jim Crow South, Luper vowed to take on segregation. "I was always
taught that segregation was wrong," she explained. "My dad was a veteran of
World War I and he believed what Woodrow Wilson said: they were fight­
ing to make the world safe for democracy. My mother was from Texas and
380 AFru. THE FACT: THE ART OJI HISTORICAL DETECTION

Clara Luper, known to many people as the mother of the civil rights movement,
led sit-in protests in Oklahoma City in August 1958.

she saw a black person burned in Paris, Texas and she was afraid that would
happen to anyone who spoke out against segregation."
Luper spoke out anyway. She embraced a plan put forward by the local
NAACP youth council to integrate public accommodations. At first, she
and her followers were a bit naive, "We thought all we had to do was make
our wishes known." Along with a friend, "who happened to be white," and
"shared her excitement about the project," Luper went to a restaurant.
''When we did that, all hell broke out because they would say to the white
lady, come in, but Clara Luper, you can't come in." Despite the hostile reac­
tions, Luper kept up her campaign, until even her students became involved.
"And after seventeen months, the kids made reports and my daughter Mari­
lyn said, let's go downtown and wait." They "selected the stores where most
blacks traded. So we decided that night to go to Katz Drug Store. Katz Drug
Store not only had drugs, it had a basement with tennis shoes and shirts and
what have you. So we went in, 13 of us, and took seats." The students Luper
escorted to the lunch counter ranged in age from six to seventeen. "Peo­
ple that had known us for years began to curse us. They called the police.
Policemen came from all directions, but we were just sitting at the counter.
We were not arrested," Luper told an interviewer.
 Sitting-In 3 81

Sit-ins in Nashville followed soon after those in Greensboro. They lasted from
February through May and were notable for their disciplined nonviolence.
Nashville merchants agreed to integrate before those in Greensboro.

That was 1958. Luper helped integrate many public facilities in Oklahoma
City over a year before the sit-ins in Greensboro. Similar efforts succeeded
in Tulsa and in Wichita, Kansas. Luper was truly a civil rights pioneer who
acted as boldly as any heroes of the movement. Yet while most civil rights
histories mention McNeil, Richmond, Blair, and McCain, few tell her story.
Luper's success may have transformed the racial climate in Oklahoma, but it
did not immediately inspire others to follow her example.
Civil rights activists in Nashville, such as John Lewis, Diane Nash, James
Lawson, and Marion Barry, are better known today than Clara Luper
and even the Greensboro Four. But that is less because of what they did
to integrate Nashville and more because of the roles they later played on
the national stage. All the same, any­
one familiar with the civil rights move­ Most observers in 1959 would
ment in 1959 would have predicted
have prediaed that Nashville,
that Nashville, not Greensboro, would
become the cradle of the sit-in crusade.
not Greensb<rro, would become
During the Civil War, Tennessee never the cradle ofthe sit-in crusade.
joined the Confederacy, and Nashville
was known as "the Athens of the South" (it even allowed a few blacks on
the school board, city council, and police force). But in all other matters
racial, the state and city were as thoroughly segregated as any place in the
South. By 1958 local black leaders were detennined to integrate the city.
382 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

They formed the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) as

an affiliate of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Confer­
ence. Unlike the Greensboro Four, who mostly thought and talked about
ways to push integration, students in Nashville actually trained for a sit-in
campaign. Beginning in March 1958, they attended NCLC workshops on
nonviolent tactics led by Reverend James Lawson, who had steeped himself
in the teachings of Gandhi and King.
During November and December 1959, Nashville protesters actually
held sit-ins at several downtown department stores. Anticipating the tactics
used in Greensboro, studentsJohn Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion
Barry, and several clergy bought goods and then attempted to desegregate
the lunch counters. They stayed only long enough to have their requests for
service denied and then left. Lawson continued to train other college stu­
dents to participate in the protests. But these Nashville sit-ins, like Luper's
in Oklahoma City, attracted no significant national attention. Only after
Greensboro did Nashville's black college students launch their first full­
scale efforts. For the next three months, they targeted the downtown stores
as well as the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals. Their principles of
direct nonviolent protest and civil deportment became models for other pro­
tests. And as we have seen, when the police began to arrest protesters, the
community rallied to provide financial and legal support. By May 10, 1960,
Nashville began to desegregate its public facilities.

WHY HERE? WHY Now?

So we are still left to puzzle out why Greensboro and not Oklahoma City
or Nashville? And why February 1960 and not 1957, 1958, or 1959? For­
tunately, sociologists have other models that help historians focus on the
circumstances peculiar to Greensboro in 1960 that may help us answer those
questions. Doug McAdam applied a model of "political process" to explain
the emergence of the activist phase of civil rights protest after Greensboro.
His model brings our attention to three factors involved in the formation of
social movements: first, "the level of organization within an aggrieved pop­
ulation"; second, "the collective assessment of the prospects for successful
insurgency within that same population"; and third, "the political alignment
of groups within the larger political environment."
Let's develop these concepts a little more so we see how they apply to
our questions. Consider first what creates a level of organization that is
strong and effective. McAdam identified four essential elements-members,
solidarity incentives, communications channels, and leaders. Members are
recruited into social movements along existing lines of interaction. So, for
example, we have already seen that the Greensboro Four all had participated
in NAACP youth groups and had other ties through church and high school.
Further, social movements often gain members when preexisting groups
merge into a new coalition. As one sociologist commented, "mobilization
 Sitting-In 383

does not occur through the recruitment of large numbers of isolated and
solitary individuals. It occurs as a result of recruiting blocs of people who are
already highly organized and participants." This proved true at North Caro­
lina A&T, where students who knew each other from campus organizations
quickly mobilized to join the sit-ins.
The task of recruiting members, however, is complicated by what soci­
ologists refer to as the "free rider" problem: individuals perceive that they
can realize the benefits of collective action whether or not they join. Some
potential recruits sit on the sidelines rather than accept the risks of protest­
ing. Organizations counter this passivity by providing incentives to join­
McAdam's second point-by offer­
ing a sense of belonging, praising
The ''free rider" problem
members' contributions, and nurtur­
complicates the recruiting of new
ing a sense of mutual achievement.
Solidarity can be achieved more read­ members to a social movement.
ily when movements communicate
effectively-the third point. SCLC chapters in local churches had well­
established lines of communication within the community and with other
church congregations that were under the SCLC umbrella. Phone trees, let­
ter chains, meeting halls, and common space allowed insurgents to reach
significant numbers of like-minded people quickly. Finally, movements
need leaders who consolidate and direct members. These leaders have often
developed their skills in other organizations and can use their prestige to
draw members into the social insurgency.
Even with strong organization, most movement groups face numerous
disadvantages in the political arena. The same lack of power and political
access that sparks minorities to mobilize also limits their chances for success.
The likelihood that they will succeed, however, is not static over time. Key
events or historical trends may arise that challenge the foundation on which
the established power structure rests. Economic downturns, rising unem­
ployment, shifts in population demographics, wars-all these and more can
play a role in shifting the balance of power. After World War II, for example,
the South became increasingly urban. Greensboro's population grew from
about 75,000 to 120,000 between 1950 and 1960. The mechanization of cot­
ton harvesting forced large numbers of African Americans to relocate to cit­
ies. In 1960 they accounted for over a third of Greensboro's population.
Because Jim Crow laws denied them the vote, urban blacks could not
directly pressure city political establishments to address their grievances. As
African Americans increasingly moved to the city, however, the NAACP and
SCLC could more easily recruit new members and initiate indirect politi­
cal action. That was the case during the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama, where many city businesses relied increasingly on African Ameri­
can customers. In this increasing dependence, civil rights organizations dis­
covered "a structure of political opportunity." Faced with a threat to their
businesses, white store owners often pressured politicians to help end the
protests. Increased economic power gave the movements an effective means
3 84 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

to overcome their relative political powerlessness. And the emerging dynamic

was amplified over time. As the insurgents became more organized and more
insistent, segregationists were forced to take ever more extreme measures to
maintain Jim Crow. Growing pressure from the Supreme Court and other
federal agencies further improved "the structure of political opportunities"
facing prospective insurgents.
Turn now to the idea of "insurgent consciousness," which McAdam
argued was also key to a movement's success. Enough people must come
to recognize that the system they seek to overthrow is vulnerable and that
new circumstances make success more likely. In the Declaration of Indepen­
dence, Thomas Jefferson noted that "in the Course of human events," it had
become "necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands, which have
connected them with another." Here he was expressing an "insurgent con­
sciousness" that the colonists had become "one people," united in the belief
that circumstances impelled them to sever their ties with England.
Three "cognitions," or collective understandings, were embedded in Jef­
ferson's assertion. First, the colonists had come to believe that the "system"­
in this case England's North American empire-had lost its legitimacy. They
were no longer willing to accept the authority of the king, Parliament, or the
royal officials sent to govern them. Second, the colonists no longer viewed
imperial rule as permanent or immutable. Finally, the colonists had become
persuaded that they could successfully "dissolve the political bands" that
had tied them to England. These perceptions were not based on any hard
evidence; indeed, many people doubted that a group of ragtag revolution­
aries could successfully revolt against the world's premier military power.
Rather, rebel leaders persuaded each other that together they could and
should push the cause of separation. They succeeded in large part because
they had an organizational network in place (think the Continental Con­
gress) and well-developed lines of communications (recall the Committees
of Correspondence)-in short, indigenous organizational strength.
Organizational readiness, insurgent consciousness, and political oppor­
tunities: Were the same key factors in play at Greensboro? And were they
more fully evolved there than in either Oklahoma City in 1958 or Nashville
in December 1959? After all, the NAACP and SCLC were active in all three
communities. All had civil rights leaders who were convinced that segrega­
tion was illegitimate and that the dependence of local merchants on black
customers made the system vulnerable to boycotts and protests. What none
of them could determine, as they planned their protests, was the level of
repression that segregationists would use to keep Jim Crow in force.
Clara Luper found an effective way to restrain the authorities. Many of
her student protesters came from the local elementary schools. Arrest or vio­
lence against young children would have exposed Oklahoma City to outside
criticism or even federal intervention. Facing these youthful protesters, the
authorities quietly gave in to demands for desegregation. Luper's success
might have persuaded civil rights activists that similar success was possible
elsewhere, but the low-key nature of her efforts inspired few demonstrations
 Sitting-In 3 85

outside Oklahoma. Furthermore, Luper's use of young children had a down­

side. It posed a level of risk that many parents were not inclined to accept.
Hence Luper's strategy was not readily exportable as a model for protest
elsewhere.
The Nashville students were older than those in Oklahoma City, but they
were guided by leaders from the NAACP and SCLC who were inclined
to a "go slow" approach to insurgency. Having witnessed arbitrary arrests,
beatings, and lynchings, the students' older mentors understood all too
well the forces arrayed against them and the potential for violence. Thus
when the Nashville students sat down at the lunch counters and placed
their orders, they left as soon as they were refused service. On the positive
side, the quick exit gave authorities little time to intervene or arrest anyone,
nor the chance for violent mobs to assemble. Unfortunately, the same tactic
also deprived the protest of much impact. The students had demonstrated
courage and their sense of grievance, but they had established no "insurgent
consciousness"-no conviction that peaceful sit-ins would actually under­
mine segregation.
Student leadership distinguished Greensboro from Nashville and Okla­
homa City. Where Luper shepherded her elementary-school students into
lunchrooms andJames Lawson and other adult leaders coached the Nashville
students on the strategies of nonviolent protest, the Greensboro Four acted
on their own-not sure how long they might have to wait to be served but
determined to hang in there as long as it took. In the days that followed, as
the news media picked up the story, students from A&T and other area col­
leges joined in. And when the sit-ins spread to other communities, including
Nashville, college students took the lead, even as many civil rights leaders
counseled restraint. Though surprised by the Greensboro results, Nashville
students eagerly came to the conclusion that sit-ins in public facilities could
succeed in attacking segregation. The students shifted the focus and style of
protest. Where the NAACP concentrated on school desegregation and the
SCLC sought to integrate public transportation, the students adopted the
sit-in as their primary tactic and public accommodations as their principle
targets.
Not that student leaders pushed their elders aside. The student-led phase
of the civil rights movement succeeded because it added a new layer of orga­
nizational resources to those that already existed. Local SCLC and NAACP
chapters called on their members to support the spreading sit-ins with bail
money, lawyers, and meeting
places. SCLC leader Wyatt "The church is the primary means
Tee Walker asked-and not
of communication, far ahead of
just rhetorically-"If a Negro's
the second best, which is the Negro
going to have a meeting, where's
he going to have it?" Publicly barbershop and beaury parlor. "
funded colleges and universities
were normally out of the question. "The church is the primary means of
communication," Walker insisted, "far ahead of the second best, which is
3 86 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

VIRGINIA

Greensboro
Feb,. 1 Durham
e
e e Feb. 8
�igh Point •Raleigh
P�b. 11 Feb. 12
'{)

• Charlot�e
NORTH
r -
- --.-_...�
.., Feb. 9 � CAROLINA

SOUTH
CAROLINA

The dates on this map refer to protests that occurred after the Greensboro
sit-in. They confirm Doug McAdam's conclusion that informal and formal
communications encouraged nearby campus groups to follow the lead of the
Greensboro protesters. Protests on campuses without those links took longer
to organize. (Source: Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development ofBlack
Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999)

the Negro barbershop and beauty parlor." All the same, students possessed
communication networks on and between campuses that were separate from
those their elders had developed. Fraternities and sororities, service organi­
zations,and even athletic teams provided essential links.
Doug McAdam, applying what sociologists call "diffusion theory," discov­
ered that "student-initiated protest activity ... occurred earlier at campuses
closer to the original protest site-Greensboro, North Carolina-and only
later at schools some distance removed." He made that assumption by notic­
ing that the protests after Greensboro adopted both the same strategy (sit-ins)
and similar targets (public accommodations). The information he compiled
(represented in the map above) suggests that formal and informal communi­
cations links did influence the timing and location of the protests that spread
from one city to the next. One sociologist even tied the pattern of protests
to intercollegiate sports. Nearby colleges refused to be shown up. If a rival
school sat-in, so would they. Eleven of the first fifteen protests took place in
the Piedmont region within 100 miles of Greensboro. Five of those were at
schools whose basketball teams played A&T within two weeks after the ini­
tial sit-in. McAdam thus concluded that as "in the case of both the NAACP
and the black churches, the campuses afforded the burgeoning movement an
effective communications network through which local protest units could be
linked together to provide a broader geographic base."
 Sitting-In 387

Besides introducing new civil rights communications networks, the

student movement greatly enhanced the organizational base. Sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier had earlier dismissed black college students as too
conservative and bourgeois to become involved in social protest. Greens­
boro demonstrated that he had been far too pessimistic. Campuses, in fact,
provided social movements with a fertile source of new recruits. As sociolo­
gist Alton Morris observed, their communications networks made them ideal
places "for rapid mobilization to occur." Students were also free of social and
political pressures that inhibited their parents, teachers, and school adminis­
trators. They did not have "families to support, employers' rules and dictates
to follow, or crystallized notions of what was 'impossible' and 'unrealistic.' "
Equally important, students had the time and energy needed to protest
effectively. Finally, as Morris concluded, "students were available to protest
because, like ministers, they were an organized group within the black com­
munity who were relatively independent of white economic control." Unlike
most adults, they could not be fired.
In that way Greensboro took advantage of new "political opportunities"
that helped establish a new "insurgent consciousness." After McNeil, Rich­
mond, Blair, and McCain sat-in, they were not arrested, beaten, nor expelled.
Instead, they became heroes, and hundreds of would-be student protesters
discovered a new sense of possibility. Sit-ins could work, the authorities were
not invincible, and the risks involved were not as daunting as protesters pre­
viously assumed.
Social movement theory does help explain the genesis of Greensboro's pro­
test and its relationship to the civil rights movement it helped spawn. The
Greensboro Four's decision to integrate Woolworth's may have arisen spon­
taneously, but it had firm roots in the local and national civil rights movement.
Greensboro spread so quickly and so far because the civil rights movement had
reached a tipping point. As Rhone Frazer, a historian of the sit-ins wrote "The
American civil rights narrative has too often been reduced to a tale of sponta­
neous invention, rather than the product of intense debate, meticulous plan­
ning and, often, tactical and strategic genius on the part of the organizers."

SNCC AND THE DISORGANIZATION

OF THE MOVEMENT
The student energy and initiative that inspired the sit-in movement added
a vital element to the civil rights movement. Yet nothing that happened at
Greensboro guaranteed that it was on a sure path to success. Indeed, over
the next few years, student activism proved as much a disruptive as a unify­
ing force. Again, social movement theory helps explain why the addition of
college and university students to the insurgency contributed to the passage
of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as
to the splintering of the civil rights coalition and its crusade for integration
and equal rights.
388 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

We can understand this apparent contradiction by asking a simple ques­

tion: How did the insurgent consciousness of student protesters compare to
that of traditional civil rights groups such as CORE, the NAACP, and the
SCLC? The question's answer can be found in the organization that came to
represent student protest-the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit­
tee. Credit for the creation of SNCC must go to Ella Baker, one of the origi­
nal founders of the SCLC. In 1960, as the sit-ins erupted, Baker had grown
so outspoken about the cautiousness
of King and the ministers who ran the
Credit for the creation of SNCC
SCLC that they terminated her role
must go to Ella Baker, one of the
as executive director. Looking to take
the movement further and faster, Baker original founders of the SCLC.
saw students as the basis for a new
and more dynamic approach. As a graduate of a southern college, she wor­
ried about how little prepared these young civil rights activists were for the
uncertain future ahead. Their initial successes gave them an unrealistic faith
in the potential of direct-action protests to overturn segregation. In reality,
student protesters had no organizing principles or leadership beyond their
campuses. Baker believed that more coordinated action was needed to maxi­
mize their potential. To that end, in April 1960 she organized the Southwide
Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation at
Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
What would be the new group's link to established civil rights groups?
Baker sensed that the major organizations wanted to capture the activists'
energy and channel it into their own programs. The NAACP, SCLC, and
CORE all sent observers to the Raleigh convention, as did sympathetic
northern groups such as the Young People's Socialist League, the National
Student Association, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Julian
Bond, a student activist from Atlanta, recalled, "NAACP wanted us to be
NAACP youth chapters, CORE wanted us to become CORE chapters,
SCLC wanted us to become the youth wing of SCLC." Baker urged students
to cooperate with the traditional organizations on terms of equality but not
to tolerate "anything that smacked of manipulation or domination." With
her encouragement, the delegates "finally decided we'd be our own thing."
The thing they chose was the Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, eventually dropping the temporary T.
While SNCC added a third level to the civil rights movement, it also
introduced new tensions. Reverend James Lawson from Nashville pressed
students to accept a religious commitment to nonviolence. "Love is the
central motif of nonviolence," Lawson explained. "Such love goes to the
extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility."
Inspired by Lawson and Martin Luther King, the delegates agreed that their
organization would be nonviolent, but, in line with Baker, most delegates
wanted SNCC to be more action-oriented than its allies. SNCC would not
simply coordinate the activities of local protesters. It aimed at becoming the
vanguard of an ever-widening civil rights movement.
 Sitting-In 3 89

Robert Moses made a promise to Anzie Moore to bring students to Mississippi to

promote voter registration. Here, during Mississippi Freedom Summer, he leads a
mixed racial group of SNCC volunteers who canvased rural voters. The attention
given to the integrated voter registration drive bothered some black SNCC
veterans who had previously suffered beatings, arbitrary arrest, and even murder
without much attention from the national media.

Despite its high ambitions, SNCC was always short of money and staff
to carry out its mission. Baker arranged office space at SCLC's Atlanta
headquarters, while the National Student Association provided additional
resources. She also recruited Robert Moses, the math teacher from New
York who went south after being inspired by news of the sit-ins. Moses was
an unlikely person to determine SNCC's future. Slight of build, light in com­
plexion, somber in manner, he led by quiet example rather than charisma.
Though, as one reporter noted, Moses was "an outstandingly poor speaker,"
people found him accessible, a listener more than a talker. He urged SNCC
to practice what was known as "participatory democracy"-allowing those
most directly affected a central role in decision making. That approach was a
departure from the lawyer-led NAACP and the preacher-led SCLC.
When Moses went to Mississippi to recruit local leaders to attend a SNCC
conference in October, he met Anzie Moore, from Cleveland, Mississippi.
Moore agreed to go to Atlanta in October but made dear that voter registra­
tion, not desegregation, was his agenda. Moore impressed Moses when he
suggested that he send SNCC students down to help him register blacks in
Cleveland. As a result, Moses promised to return in the near future. That
promise would put voter registration on the SNCC agenda.
3 90 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

At the October conference, 140 people and about 80 observers from north­
ern colleges met in Atlanta to consider SNCC's future. The mood had a new
militancy. The invitation stressed that SNCC would be "action-oriented,"
because we are "convinced that only mass action is strong enough to force
all Americans to assume responsibility" for the nation's racial injustice. Once
again, the delegates affirmed their commitment to nonviolence.James Lawson,
though no longer an active SNCC member, insisted that a "jail, no bail" strat­
egy would have the most powerful impact. Lawson called it the start of a "non­
violent revolution" to destroy "segregation, slavery, serfdom paternalism."
The October conference was a turning point for SNCC. The organiza­
tion turned away from the religiosity of King and Lawson to focus on politi­
cal action. That shift brought SNCC and voter registration to Mississippi,
just as Anzie Moore had urged. "Only when SNCC workers were prepared
to initiate protests outside their own communities," noted historian Clay­
borne Carson, "could they begin to revive and extend the social struggle that
had already become the central focus of their lives."
By 1963 SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC had conducted freedom rides, boy­
cotts, sit-ins, and voter-registration drives. Those actions forced the Kennedy
administration to give civil rights a higher priority. To push their agenda even
further, the civil rights organizations needed to find new ways to spread their
message. Some leaders suggested that they unite to pass the civil rights bill
President Kennedy introduced in June of 1963. This was not the usual token
measure designed to placate the civil rights movement without offending mod­
erate southerners; Kennedy's bill attacked the very heart of Jim Crow. It would
outlaw segregation in all public interstate facilities, authorize the attorney gen­
eral to initiate school desegregation cases, and deny funds to federal programs
that involved discrimination. As a blow against literacy tests as a barrier to vot­
ing, a key provision declared literate a person who had a sixth-grade education.
The introduction of the civil rights bill coincided with plans for a major
march on Washington. The idea came from movement veteran A. Philip
Randolph, who had planned a similar march for African American jobs and
economic opportunities during World War II. Franklin Roosevelt had dis­
suaded him by issuing an executive order on discrimination in employment
and adopting a Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1963 Randolph
resurrected his idea, since jobs for blacks were still hard to find. The White
House convened a gathering of civil rights leaders, at which Kennedy firmly
opposed the march. It would risk violence, harden segregationist opposition,
and undermine his own political fortunes, he warned. Vice President Lyndon
Johnson argued forcefully that the way to move Congress was not through
demonstrations but through traditional political channels. Martin Luther
King and the other march supporters would not back down. Their restive
organizations demanded the kind of gesture the march would provide. In a
compromise, civil rights leaders agreed that the theme of the march would
be broadened to include support for the Kennedy bill.
The one significant holdout was John Lewis of SNCC. Too many times
Lewis had seen fieldworkers in Mississippi harassed, beaten, and murdered
 Sitting-In 391

The "Big Six" civil rights leaders met to plan the March on Washington.
(left to right) John Lewis (SNCC), Whitney Young (Urban League), A. Philip
Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (SCLC), James Farmer (CORE), Roy
Wtl.kins (NAACP). Lewis's determination to deliver "a forceful speech" about the
"revolution" at hand upset the other leaders. Finally, Randolph made a personal
appeal for a softer speech. "I have waited all my life for this opportunity," he said,
"please don't ruin it."

while their demands for federal protection went largely unheeded. In Janu­
ary 1963 Robert Moses and his staff filed suit against Attorney General Rob­
ert Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. They charged that these
officials had failed to protect SNCC workers from white supremacists in
Mississippi, who repeatedly violated their constitutional rights. Though the
suit failed, as Moses knew it would, it reflected the profound impatience
SNCC had with federal civil rights policies and the Kennedys' efforts to
work with southern moderates.
Out of growing frustration, SNCC grew more cynical and militant. In
Cambridge, Maryland, in June 1963 a SNCC demonstration turned into a
violent clash with local police. The governor sent some 400 national guards­
men to restore order. Such eruptions had become increasingly common. In
an estimated 930 protests in eleven southern states, some 20,000 demonstra­
tors were arrested. Such direct-action strategies contrasted sharply in intent,
if not so clearly in consequence, from King's nonviolent approach. Most
white liberals continued to urge nonviolence as an alternative to SNCC's
growing militancy. King, too, experienced his share of disillusionment, but
he was more inclined to work through, rather than against, the system.
SNCC leaders saw the March on Washington, scheduled for August 1963,
not as an opportunity to support the Kennedy bill, but as a chance to criti­
cize the Justice Department. On the eve of the march, southern authorities
392 AFTER TIIE FACT: Tm ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

MA1RCH ON WASHllNGlON
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AUGIUST '28, 1963

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began a number of legal actions designed to stifle desegregation and voting­

rights efforts. The Justice Department actually joined one of the suits against
SNCC demonstrators. Lewis planned to address these injustices at the Wash­
ington march. In the draft of a speech, he asked rhetorically, "Which side is
the federal government on?" Reflecting SNCC's frustration, he warned that
"we will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress,
but will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power out­
side of any national structure that could and would assure us victory." Civil
rights leaders were most troubled that Lewis wanted to call for a "revolu­
tion." Even the militant Randolph found the idea excessive. "John, for the
sake of unity, we've come this far," he argued. "For the sake of unity, change
it." And change it Lewis did, if ever so reluctantly. The urgency and impa­
tience with which students had energized the movement now threatened to
be its undoing. Lewis and his SNCC comrades remained deeply ambivalent
about the March on Washington.
 Sitting-In 3 93

All this behind-the-scenes maneuvering was invisible to most of the

nation. The massive crowd in Washington on August 28, 1963, offered liv­
ing proof that a social movement had been born. Organizers had worried
that only a few thousand might show up; they hoped for as many as 100,000.
That day some 250,000 marchers, perhaps 60,000 of them white, joined in
peaceful witness to the cause of civil rights. Until that moment, few Ameri­
cans appreciated the movement's force, and the voice that captured their
attention belonged not to Lewis, but to Martin Luther King Jr. King's fer­
vor stirred the crowd as he spoke of his people "crippled by the manacles of
segregation," of their poverty, and of "the horrors of police brutality."
His real message, however, was not about past wrongs, but about his
dream of a new beginning when "the sons of former slaves and the sons of
former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brother­
hood," when even the state of Mississippi "will be transformed into an oasis
of freedom and justice." Rather than complain of past divisions, he called for
a new unity, evoking a majestic vision of the future:

And when this happens and we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from
every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed
up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gen­
tiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing together
in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last, Free at last. Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last."

In that moment, King offered the nation a vision in which the spirit of broth­
erly love healed the wounds of race and slavery.

DISUNION
In many ways August 28 marked an end, not a beginning. Most SNCC
workers had by then lost faith in the gospel of nonviolent reform that King
preached. Yes, the Civil Rights Act made its way through Congress, but
under the guidance of Lyndon Johnson, not John Kennedy. By 1965 vot­
ing rights would become a reality. But for militants on either side of the
race issue, the real battle had just begun. In New York City, an obscure
Black Muslim named Malcolm X called on fellow African Americans to arm
in self-defense. He dismissed King's event as the "Farce on Washington."
"Whoever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together
with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and 'I
Have A Dream' speeches?" Malcolm asked with naked sarcasm.
Despite all the models of the political scientists and sociologists, move­
ments and individuals sometimes possess a logic of their own. Malcolm X
would make an abrupt about-face, connecting with the international religion
of Islam rather than the separatist movement of Elijah Muhammad, embrac­
ing brotherhood and cooperation before being gunned down, most likely by
some of the violent followers he now scorned. "Black Power" would displace
3 94 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the inclusiveness SNCC had adopted just three years earlier, and SNCC
itself would eventually expel its white members and collapse. Black Panthers
would call for armed resistance rather than nonviolence. The same youthful
idealism that gave the civil rights movement a new beginning in Greens­
boro, North Carolina, would also anticipate its collapse three and a half
years later, even as a quarter of a million people sang, "We Shall Overcome
Some Day."
Historians are often wary of models that try, usually after the fact, to explain
the peculiarities and contingencies of history. Their skepticism is often mer­
ited, though such models do help clarify the structural aspects of any move­
ment or revolution. There will always be a tension between contingency-the
choices of individuals that often remain unpredictable by general models-and
the need to step back and see larger structural patterns in society that move
individuals in groups, in aggregates, in movements in a direction whose gen­
eral course can no more be changed than can a river's course down a deep val­
ley. If the vendor at the Union Station snack bar in Greensboro had offered to
sell Joseph McNeil something on the side, would the Greensboro Four have
ever achieved their place in the history of a movement? Contingency. Would
the tinder then have been ignited-in June, perhaps, rather than January­
if the Nashville students had decided not just to order and leave but rather
insisted on service? We can see by tracing the backgrounds of the Greensboro
Four that there were enough people out there pushing for change-from
Ezell Blair Sr. to white store owners to NAACP youth groups-that the tin­
der would spark a larger movement. The structural preparation was there.
Both perspectives supply necessary lenses in the quest to define and track a
social movement that was larger than life.
 Sitting-In 395

Additional Reading

To understand more about Greensboro as the cradle of the student sit-in

movement, try William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, Nonh
Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1980). Miles Wolff's
Lunch at the 5 & 10 (New York, 1990) is rich in details of events. A broader
view comes from Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil
Rights Movement in the Deep South (New York, 1983). Clayborne Carson,
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA,
1995), describes the formation of the organization. Juan Williams's Eyes on
the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York, 1987), is the
companion volume to the powerful PBS series.
Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency,
1930-1970, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1999), and Aldon Morris, The Origins of the
Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York,
1984), place events in a coherent theoretical frame. Sidney Tarrow, Power
in the Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2d ed. (New York,
1998), combines sociological theory and history.
Happily, the Internet makes this a topic any student can explore. Many
materials from and about the civil rights movement are readily available.
The Web site Greensboro Sit-ins: Launch of a Civil Rights Movement, http://
www.sitins.com/mccain.shtml, offers a rich variety of information and

images. We also found helpful Amanda Strunk, "Oklahoma City and the
Origins of the Modern Civil Rights Movement" (undated, East Central
University, Oklahoma Gamma Chapter of Alpha Chi), http://www.harding
.edu/alphachi/pdf/onlinepublishes/2002Under/OKCityandCivilRights.pdf.
Lynda T. Wynn, "Nashville Sit-ins (1959-1961)," http://www.tnstate.edu/
library/digital/nash.htm, is another place to look. You can easily find more
on your own.
CHAPTER 16

Breaking into Watergate

How did presidential tape recordings turn a "third-rate burglary

attempt" into an impeachable offense? Historians move from print
into the electronic age.

Ron Ziegler, press secretary to President Richard Nixon, called the break-in
at the Watergate luxury apartment complex "a third-rate burglary attempt"
and warned, "certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is."
Ziegler was referring to the arrest of an unusual group of burglars who
on June 7, 1972, had forced their way into Democratic Party headquarters
in Washington, D.C. Despite Ziegler's disclaimer, the story would not go
away. In the months that followed, reporters for the Washington Post linked
the five intruders to officials on President Nixon's White House staff. In
March 1973 a jury convicted not only the five burglars but also two former
presidential aides. When the aides refused to say who had ordered the bur­
glary, trial judge John Sirica angrily threatened prison terms of twenty to
forty years. The threat seemed to have its effect, for one of the officials con­
fessed that they had been under "political pressure to plead guilty and remain
silent." Suddenly, high White House officials rushed to "lawyer up." By the
summer of 1973 the "third-rate" Watergate burglary had blossomed into a
full-fledged scandal that threatened to force Richard Nixon from office.
Americans got a close-up look at the events when a special Senate com­
mittee, convened by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, televised hear­
ings on what the entire country called "Watergate." Viewers saw a parade
of witnesses testify that former Attorney General John Mitchell, the highest
law-enforcement officer in the land, had been present at meetings in which
one of the convicted officials outlined proposals for the Watergate burglary
and other espionage attempts. Testimony confirmed that burglar G. Gordon
Liddy had reported directly to John Ehrlichman, the president's chief domes­
tic advisor, as part of a White House security group called "the Plumbers."
Hired to investigate leaks to the press, the Plumbers, it was revealed, were no
strangers to burglary. In 1971 they had broken into the office of a psychia­
trist in search of damaging information about a former Defense Department
official named Daniel Ellsberg.

396
 Breaking into W11terg11te 3 97

Former White House CounselJohn Dean consults a portion of his testimony

as Senator Sam Ervin (left) speaks with Dean's lawyers. Dean's low-key manner,
meticulous testimony, and remarkable memory impressed many listeners, but
until the existence of the tapes became known, it was Dean's word against the
president's.

The Ervin committee's most astonishing witness was John Dean. Dean,
until recently White House legal counsel, looked like a cross between a boy
scout and a choirboy. Testifying in a soft, precise monotone, he charged that
the president had been actively involved in efforts to cover up White House
connections to Watergate. When one of the convicted burglars had threat­
ened to tell prosecutors what he knew, Dean met with the president and his
aides on March 21, 1973, and approved hush money of up to a million dol­
lars to buy the Watergate burglars' silence.
Of all the witnesses, only Dean directly implicated Richard Nixon in the
cover-up. It was his word against the president's. Bearing down on Dean,
Senator Howard Baker, the Republican Senate minority leader, subjected
him to a vigorous cross-examination. Baker asked Dean to begin with the
"central question" of the investigation: "What did the President know and
when did he know it?" Dean remained unshaken in his testimony, but the
president's allies challenged his account. Then came the most stunnin g rev­
elation of all.
For months, investigators had noticed that certain White House figures,
especially Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman,
showed a remark.able grasp of details when recalling past meetings at the
398 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

White House. On occasion the two had even provided direct quotes. Still, no
one had thought to ask any witness whether the White House had a record­
ing system of some kind. Ironically, it was an investigator for the Republican
minority who popped the question.
Donald Sanders was a ten-year veteran of the FBI (Federal Bureau of
Investigation) before he became a congressional staffer. Listening to the
responses of several former presidential advisers, Sanders "felt a growing
certainty that the summaries had to have been made from verbatim record­
ings." He further assumed that the president "would never have said any­
thing incriminating on the record." Since Nixon's conversations would be
"self-serving," Sanders concluded that the tapes "would prove the Presi­
dent's innocence." He had but one reservation. If there were recordings that
cleared Nixon, "why hadn't the President revealed the system and used it to
advantage?"
Hence Sanders approached his questioning of Haldeman aid Alexander
Butterfield with some trepidation. Why, he asked the witness, might the
president have taken Dean to one corner of the room and spoken to him in a
whisper, as Dean testified? "I was hoping you fellows wouldn't ask me that,"
Butterfield replied. Reminded that the proceedings were official and that he
was under oath, Butterfield then
admitted that, "Well, yes, there's Reminded that he was under oath,
a recording system in the White Alexander Butterfield then admitted
House." When he gave televised that, "Well, yes, there� a recording
testimony to that effect, his rev­
system in the White House. "
elation stunned virtually everyone,
from millions of television viewers to members of Congress and even the
president himself, who had assumed that the secret of the tapes was safe.
John Dean declared he was "ecstatic" at the promise of vindication. If the
committee could listen to those tapes, it would no longer be Dean's word
against the president's. The tapes could tell all.
But obtaining the evidence did not prove easy. Archibald Cox, who in
May had been appointed as special prosecutor to investigate the new Water­
gate disclosures, subpoenaed relevant tapes. The White House refused to
provide them. When the courts backed Cox, the president fired him on Sat­
urday, October 20, 1973. Reaction was swift and vehement. Nixon's own
attorney general and his immediate subordinate resigned in protest. Report­
ers dubbed the firing and resignations the "Saturday Night Massacre." Mem­
bers of the House introduced twenty-two separate bills calling for possible
impeachment of the president, and the House Judiciary Committee began
deliberations on the matter.
Under immense pressure, President Nixon named a new special prosecu­
tor, Leon Jaworski of Texas, and released the subpoenaed tapes to Judge
Sirica. Then came yet another jolt. The new White House counsel told the
court that some sections of the requested tapes were missing. One contained
a crucial eighteen-and-a-half-minute "gap." When asked if the erasure might
have been caused by human error, one expert replied "it would have to be
 Breaking into Watergate 3 99

an accident that was repeated at least five times." Alexander Haig, the presi­
dent's new chief of staff, could only suggest lamely that "some sinister force"
was at work. By April 1974, Special Prosecutor Jaworski and the House
Judiciary Committee had requested additional tapes. At first the president
refused, then grudgingly agreed to supply edited transcripts. White House
secretaries typed up more than 1,200 pages, which the president with a show
of virtue made public.
The transcripts were damaging. They revealed a president who was often
vindictive, vulgar, and small-minded. The pivotal meeting with John Dean
on March 21, 1973, showed Nixon discussing in detail how his aides might,
as he put it, "take care of the jackasses who are in jail." "How much money
do you need?" Nixon asked Dean. "I would say these people are going to
cost a million dollars," Dean estimated. "We could get that," replied the
president. "You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I
know where it could be gotten. I mean it's not easy, but it could be done."
In the following months, events moved swiftly. Since neither the Judi­
ciary Committee nor Jaworski was satisfied with edited transcripts, Jaworski
appealed directly to the Supreme Court to obtain the originals. In July, the
court unanimously ordered the president to produce the tapes. The same
month, the Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment,
accusing the president of obstructing justice, misusing his presidential pow­
ers, and refusing to comply with the committee's requests for evidence. In
August, even the president's own lawyers insisted that he release transcripts
of three conversations with Chief of Staff Haldeman recorded on June 23,
1972, only a few days after the Watergate burglary.
This tape soon became known as the smoking gun, for it demonstrated
beyond all doubt that the president had been involved in the cover-up from
the beginning. Haldeman had warned Nixon that the "FBI is not under
control" and that agents had "been able to trace the money" found on the
burglars. The two planned to frustrate the investigation by playing the CIA
(Central Intelligence Agency) off against the FBI. "The FBI agents who are
working the case, at this point, feel that's what it is. This is CIA," explained
Haldeman. Nixon hoped that because four of the burglars were Cubans,
the FBI would assume the break-in was a "Cuban thing" carried out as a
part of a covert CIA operation. He suggested that the FBI be told, "'[D]on't
go any further into this case,' period." With the release of these transcripts,
all but the president's staunchest congressional supporters deserted him.
Facing certain impeachment, Richard Nixon announced his resignation on
August 9, 1974.

PRESIDENTIAL TAPES
In the end, the president had been done in by reel upon reel of audiotape
recordings he himself had authorized. For more than two decades, how­
ever, the National Archives allowed access to only sixty hours that had been
400 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

available to the special prosecutor. In 1974, Congress legislated that all the
Nixon presidential recordings be released "at the earliest possible date," but
Nixon was equally determined the tapes would remain unheard. Eager to
rehabilitate his reputation, he worked energetically until his death in 1994 to
block the release of the tapes.
Historians wanted access to the tapes. They promised to provide details
of the Nixon presidency that no recollection or memoir could match. In
effect, they were the audio equiv­
alent of the camera's "mirror with The presidential tapes were the audio
a memory": a snapshot of the equivalent of the camera� "mirror
words, inflections, laughs, stut­ with a memory": a snapshot of the
ters, and even coughs, exactly as words exactly as they had been uttered.
they had been uttered.
Although such documentation was unparalleled, it was not without prec­
edent. A week after his election in 1968, Nixon toured the White House
with President Lyndon Johnson, who proudly showed his successor an elab­
orate secret taping system he had in place. Such a system, he advised Nixon,
would be vital for writing memoirs and keeping on top of events. "You've
got to know what's happening, and the only way you can do that is to have
a record of it," he explained. Nixon was less than impressed. Upon entering
the White House, he ordered Johnson's system torn out. Two years into his
presidency, however, for reasons that remain unclear, he ordered his own
secret system installed.
No doubt Nixon said little about the tapes, because he understood that
bugging the conversations of his staff, diplomats, and other visitors was dif­
ficult to justify. Indeed, once Alexander Butterfield acknowledged the exis­
tence of the tapes, many in the press and Congress condemned the practice.
Nixon and his defenders responded that he was hardly the first president to
make secret recordings. In fact, presidents had been doing so on and off for
thirty years. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt had a microphone hidden in a desk
lamp so that he could secretly record his press conferences. The machine
also caught Roosevelt promoting a whispering campaign to discredit his
presidential opponent, Wendell Willkie. Willkie, it seems, had a mistress,
and Roosevelt wanted the nation to know about her without being identi­
fied as the source of the rumor. That episode ended FDR's flirtation with
bugging. Harry Truman was so offended at the idea of secret recordings
that he had the equipment dismantled. President Dwight Eisenhower shared
Truman's misgivings, but he mistrusted Washington politicians enough that
he had a crude Dictaphone device installed. Eisenhower explained, "I want
to have myself protected so they can't later report that I had said something
else." All the same, he used the system little.
John F. Kennedy was the first president to make extensive audio record­
ings, though not until eighteen months after he assumed office. Like Nixon,
Kennedy never revealed his motives for doing so. He had certainly showed
no compunction about authorizing secret FBI bugging and wiretaps, which
 Breaking into Watergate 401

he agreed to more than once during his term. All the same, the system
Kennedy installed was primitive. Secret Service agents placed microphones
in light fixtures in the Cabinet Room and in the president's Oval Office
desk. When Kennedy wanted the system turned on, he flipped several
switches. He could also signal his secretary to start a separate machine for
recording phone calls. Thus he had to make a conscious decision that he
wanted a conversation recorded.
After Kennedy's assassination, several people made an effort to transcribe
the tapes he had made, and Robert Kennedy consulted them in writing his
memoir of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Otherwise, until the Watergate
investigation, they remained a well-kept secret. When Nixon suggested that
other presidents had similarly recorded conversations, Senator Ted Kennedy
confirmed the existence of some 248 hours of taped meetings and 12 hours of
telephone conversations from the Kennedy White House. The tapes primar­
ily recorded meetings of ExCom, the high-level group of officials Kennedy
convened during the missile crisis.
Efforts to decipher the tapes were frustrated not by Kennedy family
obstruction, but by poor sound quality. Two historians, Ernest May and
Philip Zelikow, later attempted to transcribe them. They reported that "the
large majority of the tapes crackle, rumble, and hiss. Conversation is as hard
to make out as on a factory floor or in a football stadium." B ut once May and
Zelikow cleared away the static and verbal debris, the tapes told a riveting
story. They showed the president and his advisers striving to respond, under
intense pressure, to the secret placement of Soviet offensive nuclear missiles
at launching sites in Cuba only ninety miles from American shores. With the
world as close to all-out nuclear war as it has ever come, the tapes recorded
what May and Zelikow suggested "may be the most harrowing episode in all
of human experience."
LyndonJohnson's tapes possessed their own distinct flavor. Unlike earlier
presidents,} ohnson began recording as soon as he moved into the Oval Office.
In fact, as Senate majority leader, he had secretaries and aides eavesdrop on
telephone conversations and take shorthand notes. As president, Johnson
replaced Kennedy's system with better microphones installed in the Cabinet
Room and Oval Office, in the kneeholes of his secretaries' desks, in the Situ­
ation Room, at the LBJ Ranch inJohnson City, Texas, and even in his White
House bedroom. Johnson talked incessantly on the phone, whether in his
office, his bedroom, or his bathroom. If he wanted a conversation recorded
in his office, he twirled his finger in the air to let his secretary know that she
should turn on the system. Shortly before he died in 1973, Johnson told his
secretary, Mildred Steagall, that he wanted his tapes to remain private until
fifty years after he died. She later transferred the sealed boxes to theJohnson
Library under the conditions Johnson had set: the library director and chief
archivist of the United States could not listen to them until 2023.
Given these precedents, Nixon could legitimately claim that in bugging
his offices he was merely following a well-established practice. Yet, as in
402 AFrmt THE FACT: THE ART OP HISTORICAL DETECTION

Lyndon}ohnson talked
incessantly on the phone. \Vb.en
sculptor Jimilu Mason went to
haveJohnson pose, he tired of
the constant phone interruptions.
In that spirit, Mason finally
decided to castJohnson dashing
around with a phone to his
ear. That anecdote may help
explain why the large majority of
Johnson tapes preserve telephone
conversations, while most of the
tapes fromJohn Kennedy and
Richard Nixon are of face-to-face
meetings.

many of his actions, Nixon did not simply mirror his predecessors. Once
he decided to record private conversations, he went at it with a vengeance.
Unlike earlier systems, his was voice-activated, starting up whenever some­
one spoke. Why he went to such lengths is not clear, though Alexander
Butterfield commented to investigators that "the President is very history­
oriented and history-conscious about the role he is going to play, and is not
at all subtle about it, or about admitting it." Nixon reinforced this notion in
an offhand remark recorded on the tapes themselves, when Chief of Staff
Bob Haldeman commented that the Secret Service bad told him the record­
ing system was "extremely good. I haven't listened to the tapes." "They're for
future purposes," the president assured him. In his memoirs Nixon offered
a hint at what "future purposes" might be served by the tapes. They "were
my best insurance against the unforeseeable future. I was prepared to believe
that others, even people close to me, would turn against me just as Dean had
done, and in that case the tapes would give me some protection.''
While Nixon argued that the tapes were his private property, historian
Stanley Kuder believed with equal fervor that the public had a right to know
what they contained. In 1991 Kutler and the group Public Citizen sued
 Breaking into Watergate 40 3

Nixon (and later the Nixon estate) and the National Archives to release the
tapes. About the same time, a public uproar erupted following the release
of Oliver Stone's film JFK The film suggested that the CIA and other gov­
ernment officials had been involved in Kennedy's assassination. To satisfy
public interest, Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Act. All government archives were required to release any documents bear­
ing on the assassination.
The Johnson Library faced a quandary. On the one hand, Johnson had
ordered his tapes kept under lock and key. On the other hand, the library
director and LBJ's widow, Lady
Lyndon Johnson had ordered his Bird Johnson, had together already
tapes kept under lock and key. determined that they could over­
rule Johnson's order sealing the
tapes. Further, they worried that the tapes might deteriorate if left unat­
tended. Finally, they wanted to avoid the kind of controversy that arose when
Kutler sued the Nixon estate. Showing great regard for history and for the
public's right to know about its government, they ordered the opening not
only of the assassination records, but of the entire collection. And finally,
in 1996, some two years after Nixon had died, Kutler reached an agree­
ment in which the National Archives promised to release all 3,700 hours
of Nixon's tapes within four years. The first batch included 201 hours of
conversations that related specifically to Watergate, including some dealing
with other illegal operations of Nixon's secret security unit, the Plumbers.
Kutler published transcripts of excerpts from these tapes. At almost the same
time, Ernest May and Philip Zelikow published transcripts of the Kennedy
tapes, and Michael Beschloss, those of the early Johnson presidency.
What, then, would the public learn from this sudden exposure of presi­
dential secrets? The historians who had worked with the tapes believed they
were like no evidence available before. "The material in this book offers
the most complete set of data available on how a modern government actu­
ally made a set of important decisions," concluded May and Zelikow about
the Kennedy tapes. Michael Beschloss observed that "LBJ was famous for
concealing himself"; hence, the Johnson tapes were important because they
"allow us to listen in on an American presidency from beginning to end."
Compared with other records of the same events, the tapes have a "tow­
ering advantage," Beschloss observed. "Meaning is conveyed through not
just language but tone, intensity, pronunciation, pauses, and other aspects of
sound." And as Stanley Kutler commented, "The tapes of Richard Nixon's
conversations with political intimates compel our attention as do few other
presidential documents."
Opening of the presidential tapes inspired wide coverage in newspaper
stories, magazine articles, and television news programs. As historian Bruce
Shulman wryly noted, "Seldom do historical documents receive such lav­
ish attention from the national media." Most commentators were thrilled
that the tapes allowed Americans the rare opportunity to become "flies on
404 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the wall" inside the Oval Office. On the face of it, the tapes seemed less
prone to the kinds of selective bias operative in the creation of photographic
images or written accounts. Set the tape reels going, and they would record
any sound within reach of the microphone. Observers in the media seemed
persuaded that the public could now have history pure and simple, without
the interfering hand of the historian. The tapes would tell all.

THE TAPES AS EVIDENCE

Readers who have followed us this far will hardly be surprised to discover
that historians have been more skeptical-even those who transcribed the
tapes. Michael Beschloss, for example, warned his readers that "a President
who knows he is taping a conversation can manipulate or entrap an inter­
locutor who does not. He can also try to present the best face for history."
Then there is the problem of setting down on paper what the tapes
actually contain. Only with repeated listening and extensive research can
the conversations be transcribed with any degree of accuracy. Kuder,
for example, traveled to the National Archives in Washington to listen
to the original Nixon recordings. (They could not be removed from the
archives.) Because no transcriptions were available for most tapes, he had
professional court reporters and transcribers prepare a first draft. Then he
and his research assistant listened to the tapes, trying to check for accu­
racy and fill in the many "unintelligibles" marked in the transcripts. "The
process of deciphering the tapes is endless," Kuder admitted. "Different
ears pick up a once unintelligible comment, or correct a previous under­
standing." Kuder also eliminated "what I believe insignificant, trivial, or
repetitious"-comments like "right," "yeah," and "okay." Government
archivists removed other materials that they considered sensitive for rea­
sons of either personal privacy or national security. So from the beginning
we must recognize that the transcripts as presented include omissions,
deletions, and "unintelligibles."
Beschloss offered one striking example of how audiotapes can be misun­
derstood. Background noise, heavy accents, and scratchy voices all distorted
the content of the more primitive Dictaphone recordings. On one occasion
a White House secretary transcribed Lyndon Johnson as complaining in
his Texas twang that he had a "pack them bastards" waiting to meet him.
Only after Beschloss listened repeatedly and checked Johnson's daily diary
did he realize that Johnson actually said he had the "Pakistan ambassador"
waiting.
Such pitfalls aside, let us assume that the Nixon tapes are transcribed accu­
rately enough that we can use them with reasonable confidence. What story
do the tapes have to tell? Here is the transcription of the very first excerpt
in Stanley Kuder's book Abuse ofPower (1997). The conversation takes place
almost a year before the Watergate break-in.
 Breaking into Watergate 40 5

JUNE 17, 1971: 'THE PRESIDENT, HALDEMAN, EHRLICHMAN, AND

KISSINGER, 5:17-6:13 P.M., OVAL OFFICE

HALDEMAN: You maybe can blackmail Johnson on this stuff.

PRESIDENT NIXON: What?
HALDEMAN: You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff and it might be worth
doing ....The bombing halt stuff is all in that same file or in some of the
same hands ....
PRESIDENT NIXON: Do we have it? I've asked for it.You said you didn't have it.
HALDEMAN: We can't find it.
KissINGER: We have nothing here, Mr.President.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, damn it, I asked for that because I need it.
KissINGER: But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.
HALDEMAN: We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a
file on it.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Where?
HALDEMAN: Huston swears to God there's a file on it and it's at Brookings.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston's plan?
Implement it.
KissINGER: Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.
PRESIDENT NIXON: I want it implemented ....Goddamn it, get in and get
those files.Blow the safe and get it.
HALDEMAN: They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing,
you need to-
KissINGER: I wouldn't be surprised if Brookings had the files.
HALDEMAN: My point is Johnson knows that those files are around.He
doesn't know for sure that we don't have them around.

Taken by itself, this conversation is rather mysterious and more than a

little unnerving. What is going on here? Perhaps we should begin with what
we know for sure. The four participants are easy to identify, for they are
the major figures in the administration: in addition to Richard Nixon, there
are Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, General Counsel John Ehrlichman, and
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. As for the subjects of the con­
versation, "Johnson" was no doubt former President Lyndon Johnson. The
reference to a "bombing halt" gives us a clue that "the stuff " they have on
Johnson has something to do with the war in Vietnam.Johnson used the halts
in American bombing raids to encourage the North Vietnamese to negoti­
ate. But why does Nixon need "the stuff," and why is he trying to blackmail
Johnson? Isn't blackmail illegal? There is no mention of the Watergate com­
plex or Democratic headquarters, but there seems clearly to be some sort of
burglary involved. "Blow the safe," suggests the president.
Whose safe? "Brookings" is
easy enough to identify as the Had the president reallyjust given
Brookings Institution, a Wash­ an order for an illegal break-in and
ington policy center not especially safe-robbery?
406 An'ER THE FACT: THE ART OF H1STORICAL DETECTION

Richard Nixon sits on his desk while conferring with his key aides (from left
tlJ right): National Security Adviser Herny Kissinger, General Counsel}ohn
Ehrlichman, and White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. Few people ever saw
the President in the Oval Office without prior approval from Haldeman.

sympathetic to Nixon or his administration. But who is Huston? What was

his plan? Has the president really just given an order for an illegal break-in
and safe-robbery? Was the order carried out? Even though we have the raw
evidence of history before us, we are left with more questions than answers. In
 Breaking into Watergate 407

fact, however, Stanley Kuder did not reprint the transcript in quite the form
we have presented above. As we have come to appreciate, historians are not
simply messengers bringing us materials from the past. Even when selecting
and printing documentary evidence, they usually have a case to make, based
on their research. Kuder's research into Watergate persuaded him that he
knew the answer to Senator Howard Baker's question: "What did the Presi­
dent know and when did he know it?" "The President knew everything about
Watergate and the imposition of a cover-up, from the beginning," Kuder
informed his readers. As a consequence, his annotations help to make the evi­
dence clearer:

JUNE 17, 1971: THE PRESIDENT, HALDEMAN, EHRLJCHMAN, AND

KISSINGER, 5:17-6:13 P.M., OVAL OFFICE

A few days after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon discusses how
to exploit the situation for his advantage. He is interested in embarrassing the
Johnson Administration on the bombing halt, for example. Here, he wants a
break-in at the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington think tank, to
find classified documents that might be in the Brookings safe.

HALDEMAN: You maybe can blackmail [Lyndon B.] Johnson on this stuff
[Pentagon Papers].
PRESIDENT NIXON: "What?
HALDEMAN: You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff and it might be worth
doing.The bombing halt stuff is all in that same file or in some of the
same hands....
PRESIDENT NIXON: Do we have it? I've asked for it. You said you didn't have it.
HALDEMAN: We can't find it.
KissINGER: We have nothing here, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, damn it, I asked for that because I need it.
KissINGER: But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.
HALDEMAN: We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a
file on it.
PRESIDENT NIXON: "Where?
HALDEMAN: [Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God there's a
file on it and it's at Brookings.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston's
plan [for "White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic
counterintelligence operations]? Implement it.
HALDEMAN: Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.
PRESIDENT NIXON: I want it implemented Goddamn it, get in and get those
files.Blow the safe and get it.
HALDEMAN: They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing,
you need to-
KissINGER: I wouldn't be surprised if Brookings had the files.
HALDEMAN: My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He
doesn't know for sure that we don't have them around.
408 AYrER THE FACT: T� ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Richard N'axon spent lon g hours alone in his office pondering problems or
planning political strategy. This photo of the Oval Office in 1971 shows Nixon in a
characteristic contemplative pose.

The situation now is a little clearer. Nixon was angered by the publica­
tion of the Pentagon Papers, a classified 7,000-page report that analyzed
the conduct of the Vietnam War under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
The Pentagon Papers proved especially embarrassing for Johnson, because
they provided evidence that LBJ had deceived the American public when he
obtained permission from Congress to escalate the war. Nixon did not mind
seeing Johnson embarrassed, but he worried that if the Pentagon Papers
were published, other disgruntled officials might come forward exposing
other government secrets. Hence the administration went to court to block
the New York Times from publishing. That effort failed. At the same time,
Nixon and his advisers saw a possibility that they could use similar classified
files at the Brookings Institution to damage Johnson and, through Huston's
domestic counterintelligence operations, other enemies as well.
Why does Kutler begin his book with this transcript about Brookings?
This conversation suggests that Richard Nixon clearly had little compunc­
tion about breaking the law to advance his own political agenda. Even if he did
not specifically order the Watergate break-in in June 1972, he had previously
approved and encouraged illegal operations like this break-in at Brookings-­
and those who worked for him knew it. But there is an irony here. Even
though we can come to these conclusions by reading the tape transcripts,
historians have been able to piece together not only the story of Watergate
but also the Brookings episode by using other sources. Here is the way
 Breaking into Watergate 409

Stanley Kuder reconstructed Brookings in 1990, before he had access to

the tapes:
One of the more bizarre by-products of the Pentagon Papers affair was a plan either
to raid or to :firebomb the Brookings Institution and to pilfer papers there belong­
ing to Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, former National Security Council aides.
These papers allegedly represented a Pentagon Papers analogue for the Nixon
years.The Brookings plan has been described by three people: Ehrlichman, Dean,
and Caulfield.All agreed that Charles Colson pushed the idea, but all asserted that
Nixon inspired it....Dean claimed that Nixon had demanded he obtain the Gelb­
Halperin papers, and he also learned from Egil Krogh that White House people
thought Dean had "some little old lady'' in him because of his reluctance to go
along with the plan.Dean claimed credit for thwarting the plan, but his rival John
Ehrlichman insisted that he had blocked it. Only later, Ehrlichman wrote, did he
learn that Nixon knew about the plan....Meanwhile, John Dean was not so pas­
sive.He gave Krogh copies of the Brookings tax returns and proposed to "tum the
spigot off'' by revoking some of the institution's government contracts.

This account is more informed and informative than the versions from the
tapes. W e learn, for example, that the mysterious files belong to Leslie Gelb
and Morton Halperin, a former Kissinger assistant. New players appear­
Charles Colson, Egil Krogh, and John Dean-all central W atergate figures.
And two new crimes have been added. While Nixon had ordered his aides
"to blow the safe," someone else apparently introduced a plan to destroy
the documents by firebombing the Brookings Institution. So to plotting
blackmail we can add a charge of plotting arson. As if that were not enough,
John Dean, the president' s W hite House counsel and a supposed "little old
lady," illegally passed along tax information to Egil Krogh with the idea of
undermining the Brookings Institution. Finally, we have reasonable evidence
that, beyond Dean' s abuse of the tax records, the plot against Brookings was
never carried out. John Ehrlichman claims to have blocked it.
The historian's version does something the tapes alone could not do-it
places the conversation in context. As Kutler's footnotes reveal, he con­
sulted a host of other sources-in this instance, John Ehrlichman's memoirs,
records of the Select Senate Committee staff that investigated Watergate,
and the papers of John Dean. From this perspective, the tapes seem hardly
the crucial source that will tell all but rather a sometimes vivid, sometimes
cryptic record that cannot be fully understood without a great deal of addi­
tional digging. Far from being the key to the story, the tapes seem to be the
proverbial icing on a cake that journalists and historians baked years earlier.

THE TAPES AS A WINDOW

INTO RICHARD NIXON
The reality that the tapes are not so central to the story would seem to
dampen our enthusiasm about them. If the recordings tell us only part of
the truth and much that they contain merely confirms what we already
410 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

know, why get so excited? What is left for the tapes to tell? Kutler seemed
to sense that problem when he published the transcripts. On the one hand,
he had to admit that tapes "are far from the whole of the record of the
Nixon presidency." The National Archives, the private and public papers
of Nixon and his aides, the records of the news media-all have materials
essential to understanding the subject. On the other hand, Kutler argued
that the tapes still had great significance; they "are the bedrock in laying
bare the mind and thoughts of Richard Nixon. They constitute a record of
unassailable historical documentation he cannot escape." In other words,
even if the outlines of Watergate are clear enough without the tapes, the
transcripts remain invaluable in helping us understand Richard Nixon the
man. The possibility is tantalizing, for Nixon has long been an enigma to
historians.
In part this is because he was essentially a loner. Uncomfortable around
most people, Richard Nixon had few close friends. In times of crisis he
turned inward, often spending
long, solitary hours brooding The Nixon who distrusted the
and planning his own course of media devoted much of his career
action. Yet this loner chose to go to convincing them that he should
into politics, the most public of be portrayed as a tough, competent,
careers and one that requires a
resilient, and honest politician.
facility for dealing with people.
The Nixon who distrusted the media devoted much of his career to con­
vincing them that he should be portrayed as a tough, competent, resilient,
and honest politician. In a private memorandum at the end of 1970, the
president sat one night in the Lincoln Room of the White House, com­
piling a list of traits he wished to project in terms of "visible presidential
leadership":

compassionate, humane, fatherly, warmth, confidence in future, optimistic,

upbeat, candor, honesty, openness, trustworthy, boldness, fights for what he
believes, vitality, youth, enjoyment, zest, vision, dignity, respect, a man people
can be proud of, hard work, dedication, openmindedness, listens to oppos­
ing views, unifier, fairness to opponents, end bombast, hatred, division, moral
leader, nation's conscience, intelligent, reasonable, serenity, calm, brevity,
avoid familiarity, excitement, novelty, glamour, strength, spiritual, concern for
the problems of the poor, youth, minorities, and average persons.

This public persona-and the earnest, often awkward way Richard Nixon
went about establishing it-was projected most strikingly early in Nixon's
career, when his position as Eisenhower's vice presidential candidate in the
election of 195 2 was threatened by a scandal over a secret campaign slush
fund that came to light. Facing calls to step down from the ticket, Nixon
gave what became known as the "Checkers speech," in which he used his
wife, the family's modest finances, their two little girls, and even their cocker
spaniel, Checkers (a gift from supporters), to win public sympathy. "And you
know the kids, like all kids, love the dog," Nixon told the 5 5 million people
 Breaking into Watergate 411

In 19S2 a young Richard Nixon appeared on a television studio set to give

what would become known as his "Checkers speech." His wife, Patricia Ryan
Nixon, looked on with a supportive smile. In private, Pat Nixon had doubts about
Nixon's exposure of his family's financial circumstances to arouse public sympathy.
The speech, however, won widespread public support for the beleaguered
Nixon and secured his position on the 1952 Republican presidential ticket.
(Corbis/Bettmann/UPI}

watching and listening, "and I just want to say this right now, that regard­
less of what they say about it, we're going to keep it." Critics thought the
presentation both saccharine and hypocritical (one condemned the speech,
hyperbolically, as "the most demeaning experience my country has ever had
to bear"). Even Nixon's wife, Pat, asked plaintively why her husband had "to
tell people how little we have and how much we owe?" The general public,
however, swamped national Republican headquarters with messages sup­
porting Nixon. He remained on the ticket.
In 1962, two years after his loss to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential
election, Nixon lost a race to become governor of California. At his con­
cession speech he showed a different face: bitter, sarcastic, and self-pitying.
"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," the dejected candidate
told reporters. "Just think how much you're going to be missing." The press
quickly wrote his political obituary. Six years later a "new Nixon" arose from
412 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the ashes of political defeat to become president.The respected liberal com­

mentator Walter Lippmann applauded this version of Nixon as "a maturer,
mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top ... who has out­
lived and outgrown the ruthless politics of his early days." By 1972 Nixon
had become a much-admired statesman who traveled triumphantly to Beijing
and Moscow in a dramatic effort to ease cold war tensions with Communist
China and the Soviet Union. Despite his successes, Nixon remained angry
with anti-Vietnam War protesters, student radicals, and a list of personal
political "enemies " both real and imagined.After winning a landslide reelec­
tion in 1972, a bitter Nixon plotted to settle old grudges by using, as he put
it,"the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
Which of these images, then, was the real Richard Nixon? The humble
man of modest means? The whiner who quit politics in 1962? The "new,"
more mature candidate of 1968? The world leader who redirected the cold
war? The vindictive winner of the 1972 election? Precisely because there
seems to be such a gap between the public and private Nixon, the tapes
offer a window into the "real " Nixon-"uninhibited," in Kutler's words,"by
the restraints of public appearance, [capturing] him in moments alone with
trusted confidants."
This view of the real Nixon, of course, was one reason the earliest tape
transcripts, released in April 1974, had such shock value; the private Nixon
often departed radically from his public persona. Kutler's new transcripts
reinforce that disjunction between the public and private image. Here, for
example,is a meeting between Nixon and Haldeman:

SEPTEMBER 13, 1971: THE PRESIDENT AND HALDEMAN, 4:36-5:05 P.M.,

OVAL OFFICE

PRESIDENT N 1xoN: ...But [the Reverend] Billy Graham tells an astonishing

thing.The IRS is battering the shit out of him.Some sonofabitch came to
him and gave him a three-hour grilling about how much he, you know,how
much his contribution is worth and he told it to [John] Connally [the former
governor of Texas and a Nixon supporter].Well,Connally took the name
of the guy.I just got to get that nailed down to Connally when you get back.
He didn't know it.Now here's the point.Bob,please get me the names of
the Jews,you know,the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats....All
right.Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers? That's all.
Now look at here. Here IRS is going after Billy Graham tooth and nail.
Are they going after Eugene Carson Blake [President of the National
Council of Churches, a liberal group]? I asked-you know, what I mean
is, God damn.I don't believe-I just know whether we are being as rough
about it.That's all....
HALDEMAN: Yeah.
PRESIDENT N1xoN: You call [Attorney General John] Mitchell.Mitchell
could get-stick his nose in the thing....Say,now, God damn it, are
we going after some of these Democrats or not? They've gone after
 Breaking into Watergate 413

Abplanalp.They've gone after Rebozo.They've gone after John Wayne.

They're going after, you know, every one of our people.God damn it,
they were after me....

The comparison between the Richard Nixon in this conversation and

the man who gave the Checkers speech is astonishing.Where the younger,
public Nixon appeared modest and upright, this private Nixon is angry,
vulgar, and vindictive. He is clearly persuaded that enemies in the Internal
Revenue Service are out to attack supporters such as Robert Abplanalp and
Bebe Rebozo, businessmen and social companions with whom Nixon liked
to relax, and John Wayne, the actor, also noted for his conservative politics.
Like Nixon himself, all three had faced IRS audits. The focus of this tape,
however, is the Reverend Billy Graham, one of the most widely admired
religious figures in America. Having developed a huge following as an evan­
gelical preacher, Graham became a spiritual adviser to many presidents. He
had been part of Nixon's political circle since the 1950s.
Given the volume of donations to Graham's ministry and the range of his
related business dealings, the IRS may well have had some cause to examine
his tax returns. Nixon, however, saw the audit not as a reasonable inquiry,
but as an indirect effort to discredit the White House and its allies. Rather
than make inquiries about the audit through proper channels, Nixon pre­
ferred to bring the wrath of the White House down on the unlucky agent
and to suggest that, in return, the IRS be used illegally to harass political
enemies. Billy Graham, for his part, later deplored "the moral tone implied
in these papers" and regretted that Nixon had "used" him to promote his
own image.
The tactic of using the tapes as a window onto a hidden-and therefore
somehow more real-Nixon does carry risks. In replaying private conver­
sations, we experience an almost
unavoidable illicit pleasure of The tactic of using the tapes as
being privy to information not a window onto a hidden-and
meant for our ears-and then therefore somehow more real-Nixon
magnifying that information pre­ does carry risks.
cisely because it is hidden and for­
bidden and therefore more fascinating.Yet it would be misleading simply to
replace the "public" with the "private" Nixon or to assume that the value of
these audiotapes lies solely in the candor with which they catch their sub­
jects. Candor is a tricky concept, and historians need to be just as cautious in
assessing the tapes as they are in assessing any evidence.
One way to impose a measure of prudence is to search for patterns in
the tapes rather than picking out isolated events. Nixon's reference in the
previous transcript to "big Jewish contributors" as "cocksuckers" is truly
shocking, but it might be put down as an aberration-except that Kutler's
transcripts include more than fifteen similar slighting or stereotypical allu­
sions. None are quite so extreme, but the president makes offhand com­
ments about "Jews with the Mafia," worries that a loyal aide investigating
414 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Nixon's political enemies might "be soft on the Jews " because he is Jewish
himself,and expresses disbelief that someone Jewish might be considered to
run the FBI ("Christ,put a Jew in there?").Equally striking,it is Nixon him­
self who always injects the reference into the conversation.He is not react­
ing to the comments of others.The pattern here reinforces the impression
that Nixon's anti-Semitism was a part of his personality.
Similarly, transcripts covering the weeks after Nixon's suggestion of
undertaking a Brookings burglary reveal a highly significant pattern. Nix­
on's tirade about blowing the safe is no momentary rage.Two weeks later,
on June 30, the president again is telling Haldeman, "I want Brookings, I
want them just to break in and take it out. Do you understand?" The fol­
lowing day, July 1, the demands continue: "Did they get the Brookings
Institute raided last night? No. Get it done. I want it done. I want the
Brookings Institute's safe cleaned out in a way that makes somebody else
[responsible?]." Later in the day, at yet another meeting, the president
complains to Ehrlichman that Henry Kissinger isn't pushing hard enough
on the Brookings documents: "Henry welshed on these, you know. He's
a little afraid .... John, you mop up.You're in charge of that. And I want
it done today and I'd like a report." And in case his aides have somehow
missed the point, again on July 2: "Also, I really meant it when-I want to
go in and crack that safe.W alk in and get it.I want Brookings cut.They've
got to do it."
More than Kutler's succinct summary, the tapes' repetitive, insistent,
unremitting demands make clear how much Watergate was Nixon's own
undoing.Indeed,the transcripts are full of laments by the president that he
can find no one as ruthless as he.Kissinger,we have seen,is "a little afraid."
Attorney General John Mitchell, known to the public as a stern-faced man,
is not tough enough."John is just too damn good a lawyer,you know," com­
ments Nixon."It just repels him to do these horrible things,but they've got
to be done." Should John Ehrlichman and John Dean be anointed as hatchet
men?Alas, they're good lawyers too, "always saying, well, we've got to win
the court case [over the Pentagon Papers] through the court. ... I don't
want that fellow Ells berg [who leaked the Pentagon Papers] to be brought
up until after the election. I mean,just let-convict the son of a bitch in the
press. That's the way it's done ... Nobody ever reads any of this in my biog­
.

raphies. Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case [in which Nixon
accused Alger Hiss in 1948 of being a communist spy ] in Six Crises and you'll
see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the Goddamn courts or the
attorney general or the FBI."
Conversations such as this one are convincing instances of candor:
Nixon speaking unguardedly, off the record, venting strong feelings.
Although he knew-at one level-he was being recorded in the Oval
Office,it was impossible to carry on the press of business, day in,day out,
with half an ear constantly cocked for the long view of history. Further­
more, Nixon never suspected he might one day lose control of the tapes.
Still, there were times when his awareness of the recorder must have put
 Breaking into Watergate 415

the president on his guard. Consider the following exchange in the midst
of the W atergate crisis:

JWAy 16, 1973: THE PRFslnENT AND KISSINGER, 9:07-9:25 A.M., OVAL OFFICE

PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah. Christ, there's something new every day, you
know.Now it's the CIA wanting to do this shit.
KissINGER: And then they-Haig and I went on the offensive yesterday on these­
PRESIDENT NIXON: Which you should.
KissINGER: -National Security wiretaps.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Those are totally legal.
KissINGER: We said they were legal. We had the duty to do it.What is
wrong with the National Security?
PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, the point is-I think-the next thing you can say
we had-I mean, the leaks the least as it was, seriously impaired some of
our negotiations and that they be allowed to continue, the great initiatives
might not have come up.
KissINGER: That's what I am saying.
[Withdrawn item.National security.]
PRESIDENT NIXON: Let's not worry about it.We didn't-the idea that it was
ever used.Some jackass Senator said that perhaps-what he was saying is
that it was used politically.
KissINGER: Never.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Those taps never saw the light of-I never saw them, you
know.I didn't even know what the Christ was in those damn things.The
only one I ever saw was the first one on [journalist Henry ] Brandon and
it was certainly much of nothing.Do you know what I mean? Hell, they
didn't have anything on Brandon.
KissINGER: They have none.But Brandon wasn't ours anyway.It was
J. Edgar Hoover's.
PRESIDENT NIXON: I know.Well, nevertheless, he did a lot of taps.
[Withdrawn item.National security.]
PRESIDENT NIXON: They were legal, but Henry, it's a rough time, I know.
A rough time for all of us around here....

Several potentially key elements have been removed by archivists for rea­
sons of national security. As a result, the information about whose phones
were being tapped and why remains tantalizingly vague. But a more puzzling
problem remains. The tone of this conversation is more stilted than the pre­
vious conversation with H aldeman. W hy are Nixon and Kissinger going to
such lengths to justify to each other their reasons for ordering phone taps on
reporters? They seem, almost, to be pleading their case to some unknown
audience. Nixon assures Kissinger that the taps were legal, and both agree
they were used for national security reasons.Leaks, Nixon claims, had "seri­
ously impaired some of our negotiations," and had they not sought to close
the leaks, "the great initiatives might not have come up." Notice also the
attempt to shift some responsibility to J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.
416 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

We must suspect the possibility that Nixon (and perhaps Kissinger as

well) was speaking to the tapes.If so,the two men held this conversation less
to persuade each other than to influence the way history would judge their
actions.In writing his memoirs or answering hostile critics,Nixon could cite
this conversation to demonstrate that he had always acted from within the
law and with the nation's security inter­
Nixon regularly blamed others ests in mind.Historians should thus treat
for those actions that history this piece of evidence with caution.
was likely to condemn. On the other hand, no matter what
Nixon intended, the conversation pro­
vides useful clues about his behavior. Nixon regularly blamed others for
those actions that history was likely to condemn. In this instance,he asserts
that he was forced to tap phones because other people leaked sensitive infor­
mation.Nor was he alone in doing such bugging,he insists; J.Edgar Hoover
had also tapped reporters' phones. Rather than conclude that Nixon was
acting out of principle or to protect national security,historians may deduce
from the perceived lack of candor that Nixon is rationalizing his breaking of
the law.
So the tapes are not valuable merely because they show unguarded
moments.Candor is not that simple.In fact,even if we assume that all the peo­
ple being recorded are oblivious of the tape recorder,it remains unavoidable
that whenever two or more people talk with one another,they present differ­
ent public selves, depending on who is in the room. It is too simple to con­
trast a public versus a private Nixon.Almost unconsciously Nixon will behave
one way when Henry Kissinger is with him and another way when only Bob
Haldeman is in the room.In this regard Nixon is no different from any of us.
We fine-tune the presentation of our outward selves depending on whether
we are in the company of a mentor,a parent,a pastor,or a lover.
But the dynamic of Watergate,as it unfolded, ensured that conversations
recorded by the tapes became increasingly strained and less candid.As more
lower-level officials began cooperating with prosecutors and implicating
those closer to the White House, higher officials such as Mitchell, Dean,
Haldeman, and Ehrlichman saw their own peril increasing. For this reason
John Dean, the president's lawyer, steeled himself on March 21, 1973, to
tell the president that the cover-up was unraveling and that Nixon needed to
act to contain the crisis. "We have a cancer-within, close to the president,
that's growing," he began, and laid out in his lawyerly way the perils they
faced in order "to figure out how this [growing scandal] can be carved away
from you, so it does not damage you or the Presidency. 'Cause it just can't.
It's ...not something you are involved in."
"That's true," replied the president.
"I know,sir,it is," replied Dean."Well,I can just tell from our conversa­
tions that, you know, these are things that you have no knowledge of." Yet
in truth,there is little candor in this exchange on the part of either man.Far
from having no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, Nixon consistently
attempted to cover it up over the previous nine months. And Dean relates
 Breaking into Watergate 41 7

in his memoirs that during this very conversation, he was constantly being
surprised at how much the president knew about the burglars and the hush
money they were demanding. With everyone exposed increasingly to the
threat of criminal prosecution, it was difficult to be frank. Nixon himself
confided to his diary that night: "It will be each man for himself, and one will
not be afraid to rat on the other."
By the end of April, Nixon was certainly following his own advice.
After forcing Haldeman to resign, he was protesting his own innocence to
Alexander Haig, Haldeman's replacement as chief of staff: "Let me say this,
Al. I am not concerned myself about anything incriminating in anything that
I've done. I mean, I know what I've done. I mean, I've told you everything I
did. You know what I mean. I frankly-I was not informed and I don't blame
people for not informing me." Haldeman, who from the very start had con­
spired with Nixon to limit the FBI's investigation, departed the administra­
tion declaring to the president, within range of the microphones, "I did not
know, and you did not know, and I don't know today, and I don't believe
you do really, what happened in the Watergate case." Yet as Haldeman and
Ehrlichman left the White House, they worried with the president whether
Dean might convict them with his own evidence. "I just wonder if the son­
of-a-bitch had a recorder on him," Nixon speculated.
It is the ultimate irony. Far from being "candid" records of unvar­
nished feelings, the White House tapes ended up bearing witness to a hall
of mirrors in which conspirators told lies to one another that neither the
listeners nor the speaker sometimes believed, and microphones recorded
the anguished speculation that someone else might be taping. "One of the
challenges of reading the Watergate transcripts," noted Nixon biographer
Stephen Ambrose, "is trying to keep up with the daily reconstruction of his­
tory. These guys could move the pea under the walnut far faster than the
human eye could follow. They invented motives for themselves, or presented
the most self-serving rationalizations for what they had done and could not
escape, or when they could get away with it simply lied."
Novelist E. M. Forster once discussed the difference between characters in
a novel and people in real life. A character in a novel is different from the rest
of us, Forster proposed, because he or she "belongs to a world where the secret
life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be ours, to a world where the
narrator and the creator are one." Real life, on the other hand, is quite differ­
ent, haunted as it is "by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in
a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what
we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is only an illusion."
Following the auditory trail of Richard Nixon, we have come somewhat
to the same conclusion. It would be misleading to portray Nixon as a man
neatly divided between private and public selves, just as it would be a mis­
take to assume that the audiotapes reveal only his secret, therefore "true"
self. The tapes are only another piece of raw material against which his­
torians must deploy all their considerable skills in order to place the con­
versations in context. Although the tapes do provide a window into the
418 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

lives of the people whose voices they captured, they do not supply us with
a clearly unobstructed view. Even now, many aspects of Nixon remain puz­
zling. Henry Kissinger, who knew Nixon well and who was an accomplished
student of history, once confessed himself at a loss to explain his former
employer. Ironically, these off-the-record comments were picked up by a
microphone left on by accident in a pressroom where Kissinger had been
speaking. Nixon "was very good at foreign policy," Kissinger told his hosts
and-unwittingly-the world, but

he was a very odd man....He is a very unpleasant man.He was so nervous.It

was such an effort for him to be on television.He was an artificial man in the
sense that when he met someone he thought it out carefully so that nothing
was spontaneous, and that meant he didn't enjoy people.
People sensed that.What I never understood is why he became a politician.
He hated to meet new people.Most politicians like crowds.He didn't.

Kissinger's praise of Nixon's skill at foreign policy suggests one final cau­
tion. Neither the excerpts of the tape recordings quoted here nor the 600
pages of transcripts released by Kuder can convey anywhere near the whole
complexity of the Nixon presidency. Whereas the tapes of the Cuban mis­
sile crisis show Kennedy at his best, Watergate captures Nixon at his worst.
Think what a different image we might have if, as with Kennedy and the
Cuban missile crisis, the only surviving recordings covered Nixon during his
triumphant trips to China and the Soviet Union. As more tapes are released,
we will learn much of interest about Nixon's diplomatic achievements and
about his controversial, often iconoclastic domestic policies. Viewing the
man through the lens of Watergate inevitably injects a certain distortion.
Yet it must be said: this focus on presidential crimes was Richard Nixon's
doing. The pattern of behavior established early on-demonstrated by the
president's reaction toward Brookings-leaves no doubt that Nixon himself
was the navigator who steered his administration full speed onto the shoals
of Watergate. It was not unruly subordinates but the man at the top who
kept repeating, "We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They're using any
means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?" And it was Nixon, in the
final hours of the conspiracy, who could not resist making one last effort to
retain the allegiance of Haldeman and Ehrlichman before they went to talk
to the prosecutors. "Let me ask you this, to be quite candid. Is there any way
you can use cash?"
Despite the worst of his inner demons, Nixon will be remembered for
more than Watergate. But abuses of power this corrosive have only once in
American history precipitated what would surely have been an unequivocal
and bipartisan conviction on impeachment. For that reason alone, Nixon
will never escape Watergate. Like a can tied to the tail of an offending dog,
it will rattle and bang through the corridors of power for all of-one must
excuse the phrase-recorded history. Historians may have tied on the can,
but Nixon supplied the tail. And the tapes.
 Breaking into Watergate 419

Additional Reading

Stanley Kutler's Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York, 1997) is
the place to begin. Readers who want to listen for themselves should go to
the Weh site for the National Archives in Washington. Over the past few
years, the National Archives has released most of the Watergate tapes as
well as additional Nixon materials. To hear them online, go to http://nixon.
archives.gov. Kutler's take on the "White House horrors" is laid out in The
Wars of Watergate (New Yark, 1990).
For tapes fromJohn Kennedy and LyndonJohnson that offer new insights
into the politics of civil rights, seeJonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell,
Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (New York,
2003). Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside
the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pro­
vide excellent analysis and commentary. Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Taking
Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes (New Yark, 1997), gives an invalu­
able running commentary on the Johnson tapes. The tapes are available in
an audio version, which makes for riveting listening. Originals of the Ken­
nedy tapes and transcripts are available from theJohn F. Kennedy Library in
Boston, and the Johnson tapes are available through the Lyndon B.Johnson
Library in Austin, Texas. For an incisive commentary on the presidential
tapes, see Bruce Shulman, "Taping History," Journal ofAmerican History 85,
2 (September 1998): 571-578. A much fuller discussion of presidents and
taping is William Doyle's Inside the Oval Office: White House Tapes from FDR
to Clinton (New Yark, 1999).
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein describe their pursuit of the Water­
gate break-in and cover-up stories in All the President's Men (New York,
1974), which focuses primarily on events through April 1973. The Final Days
(New Yark, 197 6) picks up chronologically where the first book left off.
One comprehensive history of Watergate is]. Anthony Lukas's Nightmare:
The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York, 197 6; rev. ed. 1988). Stephen
Ambrose, in writing Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 (New
York, 1989) and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990 (New York, 1991), had
less access to tape materials than Kuder did; Ambrose takes a more chari­
table view but still lays the blame for Watergate squarely with Nixon. For
the impeachment proceedings, see the House Committee on the Judiciary's
Impeachment ofRichard Nixon, President ofthe United States (Washington, DC,
1974). And transcripts of the original White House tapes, prepared by the
Nixon White House staff, are available either in The Presidential Transcripts
(New York, 1974), as issued by the Washington Post, or in The White House
Transcripts (New York, 1974), by the New York Times.
CHAPTER I 7

Where Trouble Comes

In filmmaking, where the director places the camera determines

point ofview-and how the story is told. But the stories told at Son
My, without the cameras rolling, upended a generation offilms
about Vietnam.

P OV: the abbreviation sounds military. It could be part of the shorthand

used so often in the Vietnam War, either to label geographic areas (LZs are
landing zones), to name armies (VC stands for Viet Cong), or even to list the
status of soldiers (KIA.s, killed in action; WHAs, wounded in hostile action).
POV, however, is not military jargon. It is a screenwriter's abbreviation for
point ofview. In films, a "POV shot" records a scene as if it were being viewed
through the eyes of one of the actors. Where the director chooses to place the
camera, to establish POV, determines to a large degree how the story is told.
Where should one place a camera in the Vietnamese village of Son My on
March 16, 1968? When the artillery shells begin falling early Saturday morn­
ing, any camera angle would probably seem arbitrary. But for a moment,
consider the question in terms of altitude: camera positions measured in feet
above sea level.
POV, ground level: A dirt road, running past rice paddies not far from the
South China Sea. Nguyen Chi, a farmer's wife, is on her way to market when
she hears explosions. She turns to see billowing smoke rising a mile back, in
the cluster of houses where she lives. Frantically she runs toward a hut by
the road whose occupants have rushed outside. She follows them to a small
underground bunker built for such occasions. The boom of artillery fades.
Helicopters advance across the sky. As Nguyen Chi peers from the earthen
shelter, she sees choppers land in a rice paddy not far down the road.
POV, altitude 500 feet: Nine large army assault helicopters sweep over
the countryside. At 7:30 in the morning the sun is already heating up their
gleaming black bodies. Inside, men from the 11th Brigade's Charlie Com­
pany sit nervously. They are launching a surprise attack on the Viet Cong's
crack 48th Battalion, said to be holed up in the village below. Expecting
heavy resistance, the men carry twice the normal load of rifle and machine­
gun ammunition as well as grenades and other ordnance. As the choppers

420
 Where Trouble Comes 421

descend, their blades change pitch for the landing, making a crackling pop­
pop-pop, almost like rifle fire.The nervous door gunners spray the surround­
ing fields with rockets and machine-gun fire. These last few moments of
descent are the most vulnerable: with the choppers settling like clumsy ducks
on the water, the men will be easy prey for an ambush.Scrambling, soldiers
drop into the paddy and fan out.
POV, altitude 1,000 feet: Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker hovers in a
smaller chopper. Charlie Company is part of his task force, assembled to
root out the Viet Cong in the area.Barker watches from his assigned air lane
at 1,000 feet.After twenty minutes, he sees the second wave of helicopters
flying in, unloading another fifty men.Charlie Company regroups and heads
into the hamlet, where the vegetation is denser than in the open fields. At
1,000 feet, it is difficult to see what's going on.But there is smoke and, over
the crackling static of the radio, the sound of small-arms fire.At 8:28 Barker
radios Captain Ernest Medina, the commander on the ground. "Have you
had any contact down there yet?" he asks.When Medina replies that they
have killed 84 Viet Cong ("Eight-four KIAs ) " , Barker's chopper banks and
heads home for the unit's operations center.
The POVs could continue their upward spiral.The air corridor at 2,000
feet is reserved for the Americal Division's commander, Major General
Samuel Koster, who flies over Son My several times that morning, well above
reach of ground fire.At 2,500 feet the operations commander also monitors
the action.Stacked in layers of airspace, looking on from higher and higher
perches, these POVs provide increasingly wider views of the terrain. Yet
the perspective becomes more remote with the increase in altitude.Because
these observers see more, they also see less.
The report of the morning's action becomes distorted not only by height
but by distance, as it is relayed to the world at large. At the operations cen­
ter, Press Officer Arthur Dunn
telephones a two-page "after If 128 Viet Cong were killed, why
action " report into division were only three of their weapons
headquarters, using the statistics
captured?
compiled by Colonel Barker's
staff. The totals have risen to a final count of "128 enemy killed, 13 sus­
pects detained and three weapons captured." The body count is the largest
recorded for the task force since it began operations two months earlier.
One number makes Dunn uneasy: the three weapons captured. Could the
Viet Cong retreat from a fierce fight taking along virtually all their dead
comrades' firearms?Unlikely.Something seems fishy.
In Saigon, even more distant, the press officer has no time for such ques­
tions.He merely provides reporters with their story, which makes no men­
tion of the number of weapons captured. The New York Times front page
reports that "about 150 men of the Americal Division encountered the
enemy force early yesterday....The operation is another American offen­
sive to clear enemy pockets still threatening the cities."
422 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

As the Times recognized, this operation was neither the first nor the last
of such sweeps. It amounted to one more confusing day in a war that, by
1968, was being waged with more than half a million American troops.
How important was Charlie Company's assault? To journalists the picture
remained unclear, and there was little time to follow up on yet another skir­
mish in a distant hamlet. None of the dispatches coming out of Vietnam
gave any hint that the events at Son My, if told from the perspective of the
men who entered the village, might send tremors across America that would
change how the nation thought about the war. For the time being, their
POVs went unreported.

CINEMATIC MYTHS AND VIETNAM

During the same months that Charlie Company was conducting its search­
and-destroy operations, Warner Brothers completed final work on The
Green Berets, Hollywood's first dramatization of the war.The film's star and
coproducer, John Wayne, had made a career of climbing into the boots of
outsized heroes. For more than thirty years, "the Duke" had been the fea­
tured player in countless westerns, including Stage Coach, Fort Apache, and
The Alamo. He had assaulted enemy-held islands in World War II dramas
such as Sands of lwo Jima, Back to Bataan, and They Were Expendable. In the
midst of this new war, Wayne watched with dismay the growing domestic
protest against American involvement in Southeast Asia. As a conservative
patriot, he decided to fight back by directing and starring in a combat epic
designed to show why Americans were at war.
The turbulent events of 1968, however, made patriotism a harder sell,
even for an old hand like Wayne. In January, the Viet Cong had launched a
series of surprise attacks during theVietnamese celebration ofTet, the lunar
new year. The strength of the Tet assault shocked many Americans, who
began more and more to doubt the government's rosy progress reports. By
the end of March (several weeks after Charlie Company's operation at Son
My), the war had so divided the nation that President Johnson chose not to
seek reelection. Events at home as well as abroad seemed increasingly vio­
lent and chaotic. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an
assassin; in June, so was Senator Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate
who seemed most likely to replace Johnson on the Democratic ticket. Both
King and Kennedy had become outspoken opponents of the war.
In such tumultuous times, Warner Brothers became edgy about the pros­
pects of its new film. Newspaper ads touting The Green Berets were almost
defensive: "So you don't believe in glory. And heroes are out of style. And
they don't blow bugles anymore. So take another look-at the Special Forces
in a special kind of hell." Although antiwar demonstrators picketed the film's
premiere ("John Wayne profits off G.I.'s blood," read one sign), an eager
theater audience cheered as their hero, a tad paunchy at 61, led his Green
Berets to a newly erected outpost "in the heart ofVC country." At the end of
more than two hours of action, U.S. Special Forces had tangled with mortar
 Where Trouble Comes 423

fire, nighttime raids, and poison punjee sticks, emerging triumphant in a

fight for their embattled outpost. The movie's POVs were bold, colorful,
larger than life.
The Green Berets was easy for the critics to dismiss. ("A film best handled
from a distance and with a pair of tongs," sniffed the New Yorker.) But enough
of Wayne's fans rallied round to
make it a solid financial success. The Green Berets was "a film
And The Green Berets was hardly
best handled from a distance and
the only feature film to use the
war as its setting. Over the past
with a pair oftongs, " sniffed the
forty years, at least twenty-five New Yorker.
films have portrayed aspects of
the conflict. For better or worse, far more Americans have come by their
understanding of the war by viewing dramatic films than by reading scholarly
histories. In that sense, historians and filmmakers have become rivals: revisit­
ing the same battlefields, delving for significance in an ambiguous past.
How should we approach films that purport to portray history, especially
a subject as controversial as the Vietnam War? We can, of course, give each
film a scrupulous fact-checking to determine which parts are true and which
are false. Are the costumes right? Did a historical figure do the things he or
she is said to have done on screen? If the characters are fictional, are they
representative of historical figures in similar situations? This approach­
administering a kind of historical lie-detector test-can reveal a great deal.
But historians routinely examine the past in more imaginative ways. If we
can ferret out unspoken biases in the photographs of Jacob Riis, why not
probe the cultural assumptions of The Green Berets? If the audiotapes of
Richard Nixon can reveal nuances of personal character, why not explore the
camera's points of view in a film like Apocalypse Now?
Still, a good deal of caution is needed in this task. The best movies have
a visual immediacy more vivid than any reality evoked by the printed page.
Movies about Vietnam confront viewers with the feel of war-the oppres­
sive heat of a jungle trail, the explosive chaos of a firefight. Yet even the best
filmic realism is false or misleading. To begin with the obvious, the soldiers
tramping across a rice paddy are actors, not real combatants. The location in
which they appear is almost never that of the historical event. Just as histo­
rians re-create their own versions of the past in prose narratives, so also do
directors and their production crews on film.
But filmmakers and historians part company on their principles of recon­
struction. A historian's first commitment is to remain faithful to the histori­
cal record. No matter how difficult it is to reconstruct the often ambiguous
past, no matter how ingeniously historians tease out meaning from the evi­
dence, our source material remains our starting point.
For filmmakers, their principles of construction involve questions of
drama, not fidelity to the evidence. Does the screenplay move along quickly
enough? Do the characters "develop" sufficiently? Does the plot provide
enough suspense? These concerns dominate, even when that oft-repeated
424 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

claim flashes across the screen: "based on a true story." If historical sources
cannot supply enough material to round out a tale, directors and screenwrit­
ers will tinker with the plot and characters until the story provides them with
what they need.
The kinds of changes that are routinely made can be seen in Oliver Stone's
Born on the Fourth ofJuly (1989). Stone based his film on the memoir of a
Vietnam veteran, Ron Kovic, who became involved in the antiwar movement.
Kovic's faith in the war was shaken by two traumatic events that overtook him
in Vietnam: a nighttime firefight in which he accidentally killed one of his
own men, and another night patrol during which his unit killed and wounded
some Vietnamese women and children. According to Kovic's book, the two
events took place several months apart, but the film combines them into a sin­
gle incident. Similarly, Kovic describes a trip to Washington for an antiwar
rally; in the film, he participates in a violent protest at Syracuse University
instead, where his high school sweetheart attends college. In fact, Syracuse
had no violent demonstration and Kovic's book made no mention of a high
school sweetheart. The film includes many similar alterations of detail.
No doubt Stone would defend the changes he made for dramatic reasons.
Consider, for example, the most crassly commercial alteration: giving Kovic
a girlfriend. To justify a budget of millions, a film must make money, and
audiences are attracted to plots with an element of romance. For dramatic
reasons, too, the idea makes sense. Young, innocent Kovic goes off to Vietnam
a patriotic marine, while his sweetheart goes off to college and becomes an
antiwar demonstrator. Now Kovic's struggle to come to terms with the war
is intertwined with his search for a romantic relationship. Similarly, it makes
dramatic sense to distill Kovic's war traumas into one vivid sequence, to
leave time for the film to focus on his growing involvement with the antiwar
movement. As for the decision to invent a protest at Syracuse rather than re­
create the one in Washington, one suspects that Stone simply wanted to save
on production costs. Recreating a full-scale march around the monuments
of the nation's capital would have been much more expensive.
Even with these changes, Stone could argue that he has remained faithful
to the essence of Kovic's story. If the goal of the film is to show the long,
painful road from patriotic innocence to disillusionment and finally to a new
commitment to political change, do the smaller plot details really matter?
This is a dramatic film, not a monograph. Like novels or plays, films strive
for an artistic standard of "truth" that resides less in the particulars of the
historical record than in rendering situations and characters in authentic,
human ways. In aesthetic terms, Stone could argue that he respected the
integrity of Kovic's story and that Born on the Fourth ofJuly reveals a great
deal about Americans who fought in Vietnam.
But the point remains. No matter how "true" a feature film is to the
emotions of its characters, its makers place dramatic considerations above
fidelity to the historical record. And this recognition leads to a more inter­
esting series of questions. Instead of simply trying to discover which details
of a film are historically true or false, why not analyze the dramatic con­
struction of the film? Accept that producers and directors are concerned
 Where Trouble Comes 425

with a different kind of artistic "truth"-or even that the search for profits
pushes Hollywood to distort the past. In short, why not leave behind the
reconstruction of a nation's history for an exploration of its myths?
A myth, to quote one dictionary definition, is "any real or fictional story,
recurring theme, or character type that appeals to the consciousness of a
people by embodying its cultural ideals or by giving expression to deep,
commonly felt emotions." Many prominent myths derive from the tra­
ditions of preliterate societies: tales of Thor and Zeus, or hazy historical
figures such as Helen of Troy or Hiawatha. But novelists and playwrights
routinely create new narratives that speak to more recent hopes or anxieties.
And Hollywood, an industry that markets the fantasies and fears of popular
culture, is inescapably in the myth business, creating stories and characters
that embody cultural ideals and anxieties.
"What sorts of myths? Consider The Green Berets. Audiences already knew
John Wayne as the star of films that embodied two well-established mythic
traditions of American cinema. The first was the western, whose central tale
is a saga of white settlers crossing the prairie in order to subdue the wilder­
ness and supplant it with a new, more vibrant civilization. Wayne, whether
playing a rangy cowpoke or a dashing cavalry officer, embodied the highest
ideals of that new America. He was strong, independent, honest, and fair,
at once tender and tough. Equality and liberty were the watchwords of the
West, contrasting sharply with the inequality of aristocratic Europe or even
with the decadent, overcrowded cities of the East.
From John Wayne the hero of the West, it was only a short step to Wayne
the Green Beret of Vietnam. Instead of hunting coppery-skinned Indians
who menaced defenseless settlers, the Duke would now chase Asian guer­
rillas who lurked in the jungle. Rather than commanding a fort in Apache
country, he would defend an outpost near the Laotian border-this one con­
veniently nicknamed Dodge City. Once again, the heroes of the West would
have a chance to uproot the corruptions of the East, this time the infection
of communism that had spread across Eurasia.
Wayne's previous roles reflected a second mythic tradition of American
cinema: the combat epic that came of age during World War II. In the standard­
issue World War II melodrama, an ethnically mixed assortment of recruits is
thrown together in a frontline platoon, each soldier finding himself tested in
the heat of battle. As the platoon shares the agonies and triumphs of a common
experience, they are forged into a dedicated fighting unit. In effect, the story
retells the classic myth of the American melting pot, in which immigrants from
a multitude of ethnic backgrounds learn to live in a single nation. As the pla­
toon unites to work for victory, it embodies the very democratic ideals that
set America apart from other nations. Repeatedly, Wayne played the hero
who made this myth powerful. Like many others of his generation, Ron Kovic
remembered viewing as a boy one of Wayne's classic Pacific combat films:

Castiglia and I saw the Sands of Iwo Jima together. The Marine Corps hymn
was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats ... watching Ser­
geant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed before
426 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo
Jima with the marines' hymn playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats. I
loved the song so much, and every time I heard it I would think ofJohn Wayne
and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day.

Combat films like Sands oflwo Jima and westerns like The Alamo and Fort
Apache worked because their tales reinforced Americans' ideas about them­
selves as a people. Indeed, the mythic traditions of both the western and
the World War II epic assumed that Americans were an exceptional people,
set apart by their experience with democracy and liberty. This tradition of
American exceptionalism could be traced back as far as John Winthrop's
sermon to his fellow Puritans in 1630, that their new colony in Massachu­
setts would stand as "a city on a hill" and a shining example to the rest of the
world. Winthrop's pride was motivated by a religious vision of the Puritans
as a chosen people, but over the years that vision gained a political dimen­
sion as well, from the heritage of the American Revolution. The vision
became overtly nationalistic during the nineteenth century as the "manifest
destiny" of western expansion transformed the United States into a conti­
nental nation. Wayne's films were among the many dramas that drew upon
such themes.
In making The Green Berets, Wayne was well aware of the messages he was
constructing. In late 1965, knowing he would need army cooperation to film
battle scenes, he wrote President Johnson, making a successful pitch for the
picture:

Some day soon a motion picture will be made about Vietnam. Let's make sure
it is the kind of motion picture that will help our cause throughout the world.
I believe my organization can do just that and still accomplish our purpose for
being in existence-making money. We want to tell the story of our fighting
men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization and action. We want
to do it in a manner that inspires a patriotic attitude on the part of our fellow
Americans-a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past
during times of stress and trouble.

Wayne also recognized his own near-mythic stature in the American cin­
ema. "Thirty-seven years a star, I must have some small spot in more than a
few million people's lives," he told the president. "You cannot stay up there
that long without having identification with a great number of people."
How does The Green Berets establish its myths? Since film is a visual
medium, examine first the images conjured up by the story's characters.
Wayne himself plays Colonel Mike Kirby, a tanned, tall, laconic officer
who hates the bureaucratic hassles of his rank and insists on joining his
Green Berets in the field. Kirby's dramatic foil is George Beckworth (David
Janssen), an antiwar newspaper columnist. The visual images confirm his sta­
tus as antagonist: Beckworth is a nervous chain-smoker, generally unwilling
to look anyone in the eye.
 Where Trouble CfllfPts 427

Colonel Kirby (John

Wayne) stands with
Ham.chunk, an orphan
aided by American forces
in The Green Berets.
Apparently the producers
worried that an Asian
orphan was not enough
to melt the hearts of
American viewers, so they
provided Hamchunk with
a puppy to follow him
around.

At Dodge City, Colonel Kirby meets his South Vietnamese ally,Captain

Nim (George Takei ), an able sort, but distinctly more bloodthirsty than the
Green Berets. He has "personally greased " fifty-two Viet Cong that year,
one of the men informs Kirby, and Nim hopes to double the number before
another year goes by.(He keeps score on the wall of his "hootch," or thatched
hut.) Like all the film's Vietnamese characters, Nim speaks a Hollywood
pigeon English. "My home is Hanoi," he tells Kirby."I go home too, some­
day ... you see! ...first kill all those stinking Cong ...then go home."
Beckworth is upset to find Captain Nim slapping around a captured VC
spy-so violently that even Kirby steps in to restrain him.When Beck.worth
demands an explanation,Kirby reveals that the spy has killed an American
medic on a mission of mercy in a nearby Montagnard village.The doctor was
found in the jungle "beheaded, mutilated," says Kirby. "His wife wouldn'ta
recognized him." Such contrasts of brutality and innocence defiled become
the central stuff of Wayne's mythical Vietnam.While the Green Berets pro­
vide villagers with humanitarian aid,the VC assume the role of savages,rap­
ing young girls and torturing wives in front of their husbands.
To provide viewers with a heartrending visual reminder of the war's hor­
rors, the fort at Dodge City is also furnished with a lovable Vietnamese
428 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

orphan whose parents have been killed during a VC raid. Named (of all things)
Hamchunk, the orphan is followed about by a little puppy, apparently because
the film's producers felt that an Asian orphan alone was not quite enough to
melt the hearts of American viewers. In the climactic assault on Dodge City,
the VC commit the ultimate atrocity: they grease poor Hamchunk's pooch,
and the tearful orphan buries it as the bombs fall helter-skelter around him.
The valiant Captain Nim perishes too. "He bought the farm, sir," one of the
men informs Wayne, but adds reassuringly, "he took a lot of 'em with him."
As so often happens when dramatic needs come first, complex issues of
geopolitics are reduced to intensely personal relationships and bold visual
images. The can-do American colonel, the stalwart South Vietnamese ally,
the hapless orphan-all reinforce the myths embraced by The Green Berets.
The film ends with Hamchunk again at loose ends, walking with Wayne
along the beaches of the South China Sea. "What will happen to me now?"
he asks plaintively. Wayne sets a green beret atop the boy's head and then
(as in so many earlier westerns) walks into the sunset with his pal. "You let
me worry about that, Green Beret," he says. "You're what this war is all
about." No matter that Vietnam's beaches face east (this sun would have to be
rising); the message of these visual images is strong and clear. Americans
have come to Vietnam to protect innocents and promote democracy, just as
they had in Hollywood's previous wars.
While visual images establish mythic themes, a film's narrative structure
can be equally revealing. As we have seen, filmmakers are constantly con­
structing their versions of history
Examining the way a film� story with drama in mind. When a sol­
is constructed can help reveal how a dier is wounded fatally in a fire­
film� myths are built. fight, we must ask ourselves, why
at that point in the screenplay and
not earlier? When a woman discovers something unsettling about the per­
sonal background of her lover, we must wonder, why now? Or why at all? For
historians, questions about why events happened in a particular order can be
resolved only by analyzing the primary sources. In the case of films, charac­
ters are killed off or lovers are jilted because the screenwriters, the director,
or the producers wish these events to happen. Thinking about the way a
story is put together, in other words, can expose the intentions of the film's
creators.
In this light, the plot of The Green Berets is tantalizingly odd. Its various
parts don't quite fit together. Most of the film focuses on Colonel Kirby's
defense of his border outpost. But tacked onto this tale is a second, unrelated
story. As he prepares the defenses of Dodge City, Kirby is suddenly flown
from his outpost to attend dinner at "Le Club Sport," a fancy nightspot in
the city of Da Nang. There, he sees an Asian beauty dining with a Vietnam­
ese companion. Before we can learn more, a couple of Green Berets appear
and yank Wayne from his dinner: the VC attack has begun.
Only after Dodge City is safely retaken do we discover that the mysteri­
ous lady is a double agent hoping to lure the Viet Cong's highest-ranking
 Where Trouble Comes 429

general into a trap. Wayne then leads a commando team armed with drug­
tipped arrows and crossbows deep into enemy territory. Sneaking into the
general's bedroom, the Green Berets drug him and pack him off in a body
bag to a rendezvous where he is lofted on high by a helium balloon and
whisked away by an American airplane dragging a hook. The whole con­
coction is sheer implausible fantasy, with no relation to the rest of the film.
Worse,the extra length makes The Green Berets drag interminably.
Why tack on the extra plot? Any Hollywood script doctor could have seen
that the way to shorten an overly long film was to eliminate it.But if the pro­
ducers considered that option, they never carried it out.Why not?
Put yourself in the place of the screenwriter.Try eliminating the second
plot and walk with John Wayne through what has now become the final
scene of your new, shorter epic. Everything remains as before-the same
dialogue, same camera angles. See how the new ending plays.
The Green Berets stand victorious outside Dodge City, thanks to an air
attack that has strafed and killed nearly every VC in the fort. "We can prob­
ably move in there tomorrow," says Wayne, "God willin' and the river don't
rise." Sounding like he's back in sagebrush country, Wayne does move in.
The VC flag, fluttering over the outpost, is cut loose and blows away. As
Wayne surveys the territory,one of his sergeants walks up hesitantly:

SERGEANT: What do we do now,sir?

KIRBY: First we get some sack time.... [Pause.Looks grimly around.] And
then we start all over again.

And then we start all over again? Can this be the climax to all the tragic
bloodshed, the anguished deaths, the carnage? We start all over again?
When the flag went up at Iwo Jima, it stayed up. But in 1968 the course
of fighting in Vietnam was different-as even Wayne recognized. Ameri­
can armed forces did not try to capture territory; instead, they attempted to
kill as many of the enemy as possible in a war of attrition. When American
search-and-destroy missions cleared an area,they usually either moved on in
another sweep or returned to their base, leaving the territory once again to
the enemy.In Vietnam,the victories never quite stayed won.
Suddenly, the reason for the awkward second plot becomes clearer. In
1968 the real war in Vietnam could provide no prospect of a definitive
victory. Yet unlike history, an action-adventure film demands a climax in
which its heroes' hardships and deaths have not been in vain.The only finale
Wayne's writers could devise was a second, wholly implausible victory. The
Green Berets clings valiantly to the cinematic myths of World War II and the
Wild West,but only by abandoning even tenuous links with reality.

SoN Mv: AT GROUND LEVEL

The realities of the war, however, were becoming harder to evade. John
Wayne's film demonstrated that although myths might distort history, they
could not ignore it entirely if they hoped to speak to audiences in lasting and
43 0 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

satisfying ways. The tension between the ideal and the real, between what
should have been and what was, made The Green Berets an unconvincing film
for many Americans. And in the summer of 1968, the seemingly routine
search-and-destroy mission at Son My was beginning to catch up with the
myths in which Wayne sought to clothe American involvement in Vietnam.
Several days after Charlie Company returned from Son My in March,
another helicopter from the 11th Brigade swept low over the area. Ronald
Ridenhour, a door gunner, was struck by the desolation.Nobody seemed to
be around.When Ridenhour spotted a body, pilot Gilbert Honda dropped
down to investigate.It was a dead woman, spread-eagled on the ground.As
Ridenhour recalled later,

she had an 11th Brigade patch between her legs, as if it were some type of
display, some badge of honor. We just looked; it was obviously there so people
would know the 11th Brigade had been there. We just thought, "What in the
hell's wrong with these guys? What's going on?"

As the chopper continued its sweep, several Vietnamese caught sight of it

and ran to a bunker. Ridenhour wanted to flush the men out with a phos­
phorus grenade, but the pilot refused to come in low enough. Ridenhour was
angry. Why hadn't Honda pursued? The pilot was evasive; all he would say
was, "These people around here have had a pretty rough time the last few
days."
At first Ridenhour forgot the incident. Then a friend mentioned Charlie
Company's operation. According to the word going around, Charlie Com­
pany had eliminated the entire village.Astonished, Ridenhour talked through­
out the next few months with a number of soldiers who had been at Son My.
The more he heard, the more outraged he became.
When he returned home to Phoenix, Arizona, he could not let the matter
rest.In March 1969 he summarized what he had learned in a letter and sent
copies to the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and mem­
bers of Congress. Prodded by several representatives, the army began an
inquiry. By the end of August 1969, the Criminal Investigation Division had
interviewed more than seventy-five witnesses. The investigators' attention
centered increasingly on the leader of the first platoon, Second Lieutenant
William Calley.On September 5 the army charged Calley with the premed­
itated murder of 109 "Oriental human beings ... whose names and sexes
are unknown, by means of shooting them with a rifle." Regulations required
that the charges be filed by the commanding officer where Calley was cur­
rently stationed.That was Fort Benning, Georgia, a location used two years
earlier by John Wayne to film much of The Green Berets.
To the surprise of some Pentagon officials, newspapers did not feature
the story. But following a tip, journalist Seymour Hersh interviewed first
Calley and then other Charlie Company veterans.One, Paul Meadlo, agreed
to tell his story to CBS Evening News on November 21. His revelation sent
reporters scrambling. Both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories. These
new accounts referred less often to Son My, the name of the village used
 Where Trouble Comes 4 31

in the newspaper accounts of 1968. Instead,they used the name of the ham­
let within the boundaries of Son My. On the army's map, that village was
labeled My Lai (pronounced mee lie).
Inevitably, the memories that surfaced were fragmentary, imperfect.
Some members of Charlie Company preferred not to talk with anyone.
Others felt an aching need to speak out. In the end, there were only par­
tial points of view: wrenching, disjointed perspectives from which to piece
together what happened that March morning as the men disembarked from
their helicopters.
POV, on the ground, at hamlet's edge: The soldiers, high-strung, advance
nervously. They expect return fire at any minute-or the concussion of a
booby trap exploding underfoot. A sergeant turns, sees a man near a well.
"The gook was standing up shaking and waving his arms and then he was
shot," recalls Paul Meadlo.Another soldier: "There was a VC.We thought
it was a VC." As the platoons reach the first houses,they split up and begin
pulling people out of the hamlet's red brick houses and its hootches.
Below ground, in a bunker: Pham Phon hears the artillery stop. When he
pokes his head out, several American soldiers are 200 feet away.Telling his
wife and three children to follow, he crawls out. Phon knows how to act
when the Americans come.Above all,one must never make a sudden move­
ment, running away from the soldiers or toward them-they will become
suspicious and shoot.One must walk slowly,gather in small groups,and wait
quietly.As Phon approaches the Americans,his children smile and call out a
few words of English; "Hello!Hello!Okay!Okay!"
The Americans are not smiling.The soldiers point their rifles and order
the five to walk toward a canal ditch just outside the hamlet.
A group of infantry: There is noise, suddenly, from behind. One of the
men whirls, fires. It's only a water buffalo. But something in the group
seems to snap,and everyone begins firing,round after round,until the buf­
falo collapses in a hail of bullets. One of the soldiers: "Once the shooting
started,I guess it affected everyone.From then on it was like nobody could
stop.Everyone was just shooting at everything and anything,like the ammo
wouldn't ever give out."
Soldiers begin dynamiting the brick houses and setting fire to the thatched
hootches. Private Michael Bernhardt: "I saw these guys doing strange
things....They were setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for
the people to come out and then shooting them.They were going into the
hootches and shooting them up.They were gathering people in groups and
shooting them."
At the center of the hamlet,about forty-five Vietnamese are herded together.
It's about 8:15 A.M. Lieutenant Calley appears and walks over to Paul Meadlo.
"You know what to do with them, don't you?" Meadlo says yes.He assumes
Calley wants the prisoners guarded.About fifteen minutes later Calley returns.
"How come you ain't killed them yet?" he asks."I want them dead." He steps
back about fifteen feet and begins shooting.Meadlo is surprised but follows
orders."I used more than a whole dip-used four or five clips."
43 2 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Ronald Haeberle follows the operation into the hamlet. Haeberle is a

photographer from the Public Information Detachment. Because the army
anticipates that this mission will be a major action, he is there to cover the
engagement.He comes upon some infantry surrounding a group of women,
children,and a young teenage girl.Two of the soldiers are trying to pull off
the top of the girl's black pajamas, the traditional Vietnamese peasant garb.
"Let's see what she's made of," says one. "Jesus, I'm horny," says another.
An old woman throws herself on the men, trying to protect the girl. The
men punch and kick her aside.One hits her with his rifle butt.
Suddenly they look up: Haeberle
""What should we do with 'em?" one is standing there with his camera.
soldier asks. "Kill 'em, " says another. They stop bothering the girl and
continue about their business.
"What should we do with 'em?" one soldier asks. "Kill 'em," says another.
Haeberle turns away as an M16,a light machine gun,is fired.The women and
children collapse on the ground,dead.
As he makes his way through the hamlet, Ronald Grzesik comes upon
Paul Meadlo,crouched on the ground,head in his hands.Meadlo is sobbing
like a child. Grzesik stoops and asks what's the matter. "Calley made me
shoot some people," Meadlo replies.
Pham Phon and his family wait nervously at the top of the canal ditch.
By now perhaps a hundred villagers have been herded together.At first they
stand,but soon the Americans make them sit,to prevent them from running
away. Phon hears gunfire in the distance and has a horrible premonition.
He tells his wife and children to slip down the bank into the ditch when the
soldiers are not looking.
Lieutenant Calley orders some of the men to "push all those people in the
ditch." Calley begins shooting and orders Meadlo to follow his lead.Meadlo:
"And so I began shooting them all.... I guess I shot maybe twenty-five or
twenty people in the ditch ... men, women, and children. And babies."
Another GI, Robert Maples, refuses to use his machine gun on the crowd.
But other soldiers fire,reload,and fire again,until the villagers in the ditch
have stopped moving.
Underneath the mass of bodies, Phon and his family lie terrified. They
are unhurt,except for one daughter,wounded in the shoulder.As the hours
pass,Phon says nothing,praying his daughter will not moan too loudly from
the pain; praying the soldiers will move on.
By 11 :00 the guns have fallen quiet. At his command post west of the
hamlet,Captain Medina has lunch with his crew and several platoon leaders,
including Lieutenant Calley. Two girls, about ten and eleven, appear from
out of nowhere.Apparently they have waited out the siege in one of the rice
paddies.The men give the girls cookies and crackers. After lunch, Charlie
Company blows up a few underground tunnels it has discovered,demolishes
the remaining houses,and moves out of My Lai.
Or more precisely, it moves out of what on army maps is labeled "My
Lai (4)." Actually, the map gives the name My Lai to six different locations
 Where Trouble Cumes 433

Army photographer Ron Haeberle's searing photographs of the events

at My Lai, published in Life magazine in December 1969, provided shocking
counterimages to those in The Green Berets. The older woman is being restrained
by other villagers after she attacked soldiers who had been molesting a younger
woman (right rear, buttoning her blouse). "Guys were about to shoot these people,"
Haeberle recalled. "I yelled, 'Hold it,' and shot my picture. As I walked away, I
heard M16s open up. From the comer of my eye I saw bodies falling but I didn't
tum to look."

in the area. To outsiders, Vietnamese place names can be confusing. "Vil­

lages" such as Son My are really more like American counties or townships.
Many hamlets exist within each village, and even these are divided into sub­
hamlets, each with its own name. The Army has not successfully transferred
all the names onto their maps. Thus when friendly Vietnamese informants
tell Army Intelligence that the Viet Cong's 48th Battalion is based, say, at
My Lai, they do not realize that the army shows six My Lais on their maps.
On this morning of March 16, Americans have attacked the wrong hamlet,
one approximately two miles away from the reported stronghold of the 48th
Battalion.
43 4 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

The people who live in this settlement do not call it My Lai. Its official
name is Xom Lang-merely, "the hamlet." For years, though, residents have
also referred to their home by a more poetic name, Thuan Yen; a rough
English translation is "peace," or "the place where trouble does not come."

DENIAL
By the time the facts about My Lai became known, the wider debate over
the war had forced Lyndon Johnson from office. Richard Nixon began a
lurching four-year course of scaling back the conflict. Antiwar protests
flared when Nixon sent American troops into neighboring Cambodia, but
tapered off again as the president carried out his policy of "Vietnamization,"
steadily withdrawing American troops, leaving South Vietnamese forces to
absorb the brunt of the fighting. By 1973 American and North Vietnamese
negotiators had hammered out a treaty that allowed Nixon to claim "peace
with honor." But this treaty was largely a face-saving gesture. Despite all
pretenses, the war's outcome was a defeat for the United States. Few knowl­
edgeable observers were surprised to see the North Vietnamese complete
their conquest of South Vietnam two years later.
As the war wound down by fits and starts, so did the controversy over My
Lai. The details of the attack had been so repellent, many Americans at first
found them hard to accept. A poll taken by the Minneapolis Tribune revealed
that nearly half of the 600 persons interviewed believed that the reports of
mass murder were false. Other citizens angrily defended the accused. "It
sounds terrible to say we ought to kill kids," said a woman in Cleveland,
"but many of our boys being killed over there are just kids, too." At the end
of a lengthy military trial, Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of "at least
twenty-two murders" and sentenced in 1971 to life imprisonment. Follow­
ing appeals and a forty-month stay in federal custody, Calley was paroled in
1976. Four other soldiers were court-martialed, but none convicted.
Supporters of the war resented the publicity given My Lai. They pointed
out that only months before, communist forces had massacred several thou­
sand civilians at the provincial capital of Hue. They noted, too, that since
the late 1950s, the Viet Cong had engaged in a campaign of political ter­
ror, assassinating village officials appointed by the American-backed South
Vietnamese regimes. In contrast, they portrayed My Lai as an aberration
in American policy: "the actions of a pitiful few," in the words of General
William Westmoreland. President Nixon admitted that there "was cer­
tainly a massacre" but believed it to be "an isolated incident."
In one sense, historians have confirmed that judgment. The available
records for the war reveal no other mass executions of similar magnitude.
At the same time, congressional hearings as well as conferences sponsored
by Vietnam Veterans Against the War produced testimony of other Gis
who had on many occasions subjected civilians or suspected Viet Cong to
harsh treatment, torture to extract information, or indiscriminate killing.
Those opposing the war pointed out that even in the case of My Lai, where
 Where Trouble Comes 43 5

misconduct occurred on a large scale, the story had not come to light until
a soldier entirely outside the army's chain of command had prodded high
officials to push for an investigation. How many other, lesser incidents went
unreported?
Although the ultimate significance of My Lai remains unclear, the encoun­
ter became a defining moment in the public perception of the war. It did so,
a historian might suggest, because it left shaken the long-cherished myth
of American exceptionalism. As defenders of a democratic culture, Ameri­
cans were supposed to behave differently from the rest of the corrupt world.
They were not the sort, The Green Berets suggested, who would rape young
girls or execute innocent civilians. Furthermore, My Lai attracted so much
attention because it made the issue concrete and personal, in just the way
that film dramas strive to do. John Wayne had reduced complex political and
economic issues to visual, intensely personal images ("You're what this war's
all about," Kirby tells little Hamchunk). Similarly, Ron Haeberle's searing
photographs, reproduced in Life magazine, served as counterimages that
shattered the mythic stereotypes of The Green Berets. Henceforth it would be
impossible to take the plot and themes of a western or a Wodd War II epic
and re-create them in Vietnam.
For nearly a decade, Vietnam remained a subject too hot to handle in
feature films. Hollywood dared approach the war only indirectly, as in the
irreverent comedy M*A*S*H (1970), set during the Korean War. By 1978,
however, attitudes were changing. A new wave of Vietnam movies were
scheduled for release, encouraged by reports of Francis Ford Coppola's epic
under way, Apocalypse Now. "When I started," Coppola recalled, "basically
people said, 'Are you crazy? You can't make a movie on Vietnam, the Ameri­
can public does not want it.' "
Before Coppola could fulfill his lofty ambitions, however, Michael Cimino
beat him in the race to capture Vietnam's mythic high ground. "Ready for
Vietnam?" asked the New York Times, as The Deer Hunter opened in December
1978. Cimino told the Times that he had joined the army about the time of
the Tet offensive. "For me, it's a very personal film. I was attached to a Green
Beret medical unit. My characters are portraits of people whom I knew." Judg­
ing from the first reviews, Americans were indeed ready to confront Vietnam
head-on. "The film dares to say that things have come down to life versus
death, and it's time someone said this big and strong without fear," enthused
Newsweek. "What really counts is authenticity, which this movie has by the
ton," raved New York magazine.
But what was meant by "authentic"? To a historian, the characters do
seem less stereotyped than those in The Green Berets. The dialogue is more
natural, less stilted. Yet the film's story and images seem just as mythic. The
first third of the drama takes place not in Vietnam but in Clairton, a steel
town nestled in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Michael (Robert De Niro),
Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage) are leaving their
mill jobs in this Russian American community, off to serve in Vietnam. Ste­
ven is married after his last day at work; then he and his buddies head into
436 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF liISTOBlCAL DETECTION

Images of the "one-shot kill" are central to The Deer Hunter. Michael (Robert
De Niro, left) embodies the frontier ideals of America. For him, the encounter with
a buck. on the mountainside is a defining, purifying moment. In contrast, the Viet
Cong are depicted as inhuman torturers who pervert the idea of a "one-shot kill" into
Russian roulette, which Michael and Steven Gohn Savage, right) are forced to play.

the mountains for one last deer hunt together. Michael, the leader of the
group, regards the hunt as a defining, purifying moment. One must do the
job right, he tells Nick: bring down a buck with only one shot. Like Natty
Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century hero of The Deer­
s/ayer, Michael embodies America's noble ideals. The film's images empha­
size the deep ties binding these men: at work, the fiery flames of the blast
furnace; after hours, the enveloping dark of the neighborhood bar; at the
wedding, the glittering icons of the Russian Orthodox church; out hunting,
the misty, otherworldly peaks where Michael seeks his buck..
Moving and bold-yes. But authentic? The answer to that question is less
clear. Cimino went to extreme lengths shooting these sequences, to obtain
the proper "look" for his myths. Clairton is an imaginary town, created by
shooting in eight different locations spread over four states. Its imposing
Russian Orthodox church is from Cleveland and is twice the size of anything
a town like Clairton might afford. The hunting scenes were shot not in the
Alleghenies but on the other side of the continent, in the Cascades of Wash­
ington. When the deer proved too small for Cimino's taste, he airlifted in
larger animals from a New Jersey preserve. "We needed big deer," he said.
"I told them there would be a revolution in the theaters if we killed Bambi."
Audiences expect big deer and overwhelming mountain peaks. And because
myth deals with expectations rather than reality, Cimino obliged.
 Where Trouble Comes 43 7

The first third of the film ends with the men sitting quietly in an empty
bar, one of them rather implausibly playing a melancholy bit of Chopin on
a piano. Still in semidarkness, we hear the first faint whump whump whump
of helicopter blades. In a flash we are in Vietnam-the lush vegetation, the
smoke, choppers bearing down on a hamlet. Things now happen quickly,
confusingly. A Viet Cong guerrilla throws a grenade down a bunker, wound­
ing the peasant inside. We see Michael lying, perhaps stunned, in the grass
nearby. Suddenly he springs up and incinerates the VC soldier with a flame­
thrower. Reinforcements appear, among them Steven and Nick.
After a firefight, the scene shifts abruptly to a Viet Cong camp where Steven,
Nick, and Michael are held with other prisoners. Sadistic guards force them to
join a hideous game of Russian roulette, in which a prisoner places against his
temple a pistol loaded with a single bullet, spins the cylinder, and fires. The
losers die; the winners play the next challenger. Nick is nearly unmanned by
the experience but survives. Michael one-ups his tormentors by daring to play
with not one bullet but three. When he wins, he uses the bullets to kill the
guards and then escapes with Nick and Steven.
The three men manage to reach American lines, but Steven loses both
legs, while Nick, his sanity shaken, disappears into the underworld of Sai­
gon, where casinos offer the same ghastly game of roulette. The final third of
the film follows Michael back to Clairton, where he attempts to reconstruct
the lost world of loyalty and community that the war has shattered. Finally
he returns to Vietnam in a last attempt to rescue Nick, now a dazed, drug­
addicted professional on the roulette circuit. The two face each other over
the table-Michael, hoping that one final game will jolt Nick into returning
home. But in his haze Nick plays on, and this time loses. Back in Clairton,
his friends gather after the funeral. As the film ends, they sing "God Bless
America"-tentatively at first, then with feeling.
The roulette scenes "act as a central metaphor of this film," noted Jean
Vallely, a writer who interviewed Cimino for Esquire magazine. Certainly,
the scenes are emotionally wrenching, impressively acted, and vividly shot­
far more powerful than anything in The Green Berets. "I wanted people to
feel what it was like to be there, to be in jeopardy every moment," Cimino
explained. "How do you get people to pay attention, to sustain twenty
minutes of war without doing a whole story about the war?" For Cimino,
authenticity seems to revolve around dramatic feelings, constructing an
emotionally arresting moment rather than a re-creation of the war's histori­
cal context. When Vallely probed for more information about the roulette
scenes, Cimino seemed reluctant to talk, admitting only that he had read
about such games "in a newspaper report."
Journalists who covered the war were less reticent. None of them had
read any reports of Viet Cong forcing prisoners to play roulette, to say
nothing of Saigon casinos practicing the sport. The best Time magazine
could dig up was one or two unnamed "old hands" who were said to have
recalled "a few episodes" from the 1920s and 1930s. Peter Arnett, a journal­
ist awarded a Pulitzer for his reporting from Vietnam, complained, "I am
43 8 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

Journalist Peter Arnett complained, now discovering that increasing

"I am now discovering that increasing numbers of Americans believe
the last act of the war took place
numbers ofAmericans believe the last
in a sinister back room some­
act of the war took place in a sinister
where in Saigon, where greedy
back room somewhere in Saigon, Oriental gamblers were exhort­
where greedy Oriental gamblers were ing a glazed-eyed American G.I.
exhorting a glazed-eyed American to blow his head off." Seymour
G.I. to blow his head off" Hersh, who had helped bring
the crimes at My Lai to light,
walked out of a screening of The Deer Hunter in disgust.*
But if The Deer Hunter is not authentic in its historical details, do the
film's myths reflect a kind of emotional truth about the war? The answer
requires consideration of the emotions called forth by the film's plot. As we
did with The Green Berets, we need to ask what can be deduced from the way
that the film is constructed.
The Deer Hunter is an even longer film than The Green Berets. It runs a
full three hours and four minutes, to be exact.Yet how much of it portrays
the actual experiences of American Gis in Vietnam? If we eliminate the
scenes about the games of roulette-events that bear no relation to the real
Vietnam-the answer is, less than four minutes. In that brief interval we see
a Viet Cong guerrilla drop a grenade into a bunker; we see Michael retali­
ate; and we see Michael, Nick, and Steven become prisoners.The structure
of the film, in other words, suggests that very little of The Deer Hunter had
anything to do with Vietnam.Yet of course it does.We need only imagine
our Hollywood script doctor rewriting the plot to eliminate the war entirely.
In the new version, Michael, Nick, and Steven are leaving Clairton to dig
for gold in the jungles of Venezuela.Once there, they are captured (in about
four minutes) by rival prospectors, who force them to play roulette ... and
so on, until Nick tragically blows his brains out in a backroom in Caracas.
The structure of this new plot is precisely the same as the old one.The dra­
matic tension should be every bit as gripping.Yet would such a film receive
the attention lavished on The Deer Hunter? Probably not.
Clearly Cimino intended for audiences to come away believing they had
experienced something of the war's agonies: the haunting trauma of shat­
tered communities, friendships, and lives.But in suggesting how that trauma
came about, the film's plot amounts to a comforting, even racist fantasy. By
spending only four minutes considering American actions in Vietnam, The
Deer Hunter deflects attention away from the real traumatic events of the war
and onto stereotyped villains. They did it to us, the film suggests: we were

*Apparently, Cimino's myth.making was not limited to the movies. Reporter Tom Buckley discov­
ered that the filmmaker had fudged his age in the Times interview, claiming he was thirty-five instead
of forty. He had never been a Green Beret and had spent most of his six months of active duty at
Fort Lee, New Jersey, with about a month thrown in for medical training in Texas, where he might
have met a few of the Special Forces. This active duty occurred not in 1968 but 1962-well before
the heaviest American involvement in Vietnam.
 Where Trouble Comes 439

shattered by swarthy, inhuman tormentors. In their evil hands, the holiest

myth of the West-the ritual of the one-shot kill-was perverted into an evil
game of torture. Filmgoers who didn't want to "feel guilty" about the war
could now leave the theater singing "God Bless America," believing that the
myths at the center of Michael's world (and theirs) remained intact. Not sur­
prisingly, The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for Best Picture in
April 1979. As Michael Cimino bounded to the podium to collect his Oscar,
the man who handed it to him, gaunt from a recent bout with cancer, was
John Wayne.
And in one final irony, the realities of Vietnam again stood cinematic
myth on its head. For there was at least one documented case of roulette
that remained unnoticed by The Deer Hunter's critics. The day after My Lai,
Captain Ernest Medina flushed out another Viet Cong suspect as Charlie
Company continued south. When the man refused to talk, Medina took his
thirty-eight-caliber revolver, placed it at the man's temple, and spun the bar­
rel. Medina later insisted the gun was empty, but several of his men disagreed.
When the villager still refused to talk, Medina "grabbed him by the hair and
threw him up against a tree," said one eyewitness. "He fired two shots with
a rifle, closer and closer to the guy's head, and then aimed straight at him."
The suspect broke down and began babbling; he was a communist province
chief. Pleased, Medina posed for a picture. Drinking from a coconut held in
one hand, he held in his other hand a large knife at the prisoner's throat.

THE SEARCH FOR NEW MYTHS

Clearly the anguished experiences of Vietnam made it impossible for The
Deer Hunter to follow the older, patriotic myths of the western or the com­
bat dramas of World War II. Cimino's film won acclaim because it acknowl­
edged the pain of Vietnam. Yet it still refused to come to grips with the
circumstances of the war. In 1979 director Francis Ford Coppola's Apoca­
lypse Now provided a rival portrait that faced the realities of Vietnam more
squarely.
Although the central plot of Apocalypse Now was as fictional and almost
as far-fetched as The Deer Hunter's, it did portray the kind of stresses laid
bare at My Lai. Coppola's audience could never confuse his soldiers with the
fresh-faced Gis who followed John Wayne or with Cimino's injured inno­
cents abroad. In a sequence some critics hailed as the most thrilling battle
scene ever filmed, Robert Duvall's character, Colonel Kilgore (whose name
reflects his temperament), leads a helicopter assault nearly as ruthless as the
one at My Lai. Although harrowing, the assault seems almost surreal because
the choppers descend on their target hamlet blasting Wagnerian opera from
huge loudspeakers. (This move is to "scare the shit out of the slopes," Kilgore
explains, reflecting the casual racism so often a part of the war.)
Just as the troops at My Lai left an 11th Brigade patch between the legs
of a prominently displayed corpse, so Kilgore deals out playing cards of
440 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

death on the bodies of his slain villagers, to serve as both boast and warn­
ing to the VC. Just as Charlie Company set up camp after the massacre and
went swimming along the beaches of the South China Sea, Kilgore eagerly
unpacks a surfboard to ride the waves offshore. The resonances with My Lai
are unmistakable. Yet audiences may have been so swept away by the sheer
bravado of the chopper assault that they failed to realize how much the scene
undermined the cherished myth that Americans preserved their human­
ity in the heat of battle. Many viewers embraced the scene's affirmation of
America's technological supremacy. In a chilling example of life imitating
art, some American assault helicopters in the Gulf War of 1991 attacked
Iraqi positions as loudspeakers aboard boomed out recordings of Wagner.
Colonel Kilgore's excesses, however, are only a prelude to a more meta­
physical confrontation with the realities of My Lai. Captain Willard (Martin
Sheen) has been sent on a mission to eliminate a Green Beret colonel named
Kurtz, who has deserted and is operating independently just across the Lao­
tian border. As Willard journeys farther into the jungle, he himself becomes
more ruthless, more like Kurtz. When the boat taking him upriver is side­
tracked by a needless attack on a peasant sampan (the jittery crew opens
fire prematurely), Willard shocks the other soldiers by coldbloodedly kill­
ing a wounded woman so that his mission will not be delayed while they
take her downriver for medical attention. He then pushes deeper into the
jungle toward the amoral Kurtz. He is descending, it seems, toward the same
elemental savagery that characterized My Lai.
But in the end, Apocalypse Now is defeated by its own literary pretensions.
In trying to make the film more than just another war picture, Coppola mod­
eled his story on Joseph Conrad's literary classic Heart ofDarkness (1902). Set
along Africa's Congo River at the height of European imperialism, Conrad's
tale concerns a man sent to investigate a colonial ruler gone "native"-also
named Kurtz. Coppola's implication-that Vietnam is America's own impe­
rialist nightmare-was an intriguing notion. But as played by an overweight,
eccentric Marlon Brando, Kurtz only distracts from the grittier horrors of
the real war. His lunacy is so otherworldly that it has no connection to the
experiences of ordinary American Gis in Vietnam or to the earlier scenes in
Apocalypse Now that gave the film its mythic power.
Meanwhile, many Americans remained reluctant to examine the causes or
context of the brutality demonstrated at My Lai. It was simpler to embrace
again the traditional myths of American valor, honor, and decency. The most
prominent advocate of this approach was Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor
turned politician who understood well how cinematic myths were made. As
a presidential candidate in 1980, a year after the release of Apocalypse Now,
Reagan called on Americans to "stand tall" and praised the war in Vietnam
as a "noble cause."
Hollywood, too, burnished its views of the war. Two of the most popu­
lar films of the Reagan years starred Sylvester Stallone as the smoldering,
half-Indian, half-German, entirely muscle-bound John Rambo, a Vietnam
vet with vengeance on his mind. In First Blood (1982), Rambo takes his
 Where Trouble Comes 441

Mythical images of the West are twisted in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse N(Y/)).
In place of the can-do Colonel Kirby of The Green Berets, Colonel Kilgore, played by
Robert Duvall, conducts a harrowing raid on a Vietnamese village. Duvall's cavalry
hat draws the connection with the cinematic genre of the western, but the tragedy at
My Lai has given this gleeful colonel a grim undertone: "I love the smell of napalm
in the morning," says Kilgore after his conquest is complete.

frustrations out on the sadistic sheriff and the establishment of a corrupt

town in the Pacific Northwest, leaving Main Street in ruins. But the sequel
three years later (First Blood, Part 2) finds him back in Vietnam on a secret
mission to discover whether Americans listed during the war as MIAs
(missing in action) are still being held as prisoners. In the film's entirely
fictional plot, Rambo locates an MIA prison camp with the help of an Asian
beauty he encounters deep in enemy territory. ("Too much death-death
everywhere-maybe go America-live the quiet life," she remarks hope­
fully to the one American who has proved himself utterly incapable of set­
tling down peacefully anywhere.) But when Rambo radios in the camp's
location, the "stinking bureaucrat" from Special Operations calls back the
rescue helicopter. He has assumed Rambo will fail, thus allowing the con­
troversy over MIAs to disappear. Needless to say, Rambo manages to fight
off entire detachments of Vietnamese and their Russian allies, rescuing the
American prisoners and piloting them safely home.
Once again, the film's dramatic structure reveals the same unwillingness
to confront the real war in Vietnam. Although the producers clearly sup­
ported the notion that Vietnam was a "noble cause," the plot is not about
442 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

the war itself. Why? In an escapist adventure, Rambo must be allowed to

win. By focusing on the issue of MIAs, "victory" was defined in terms of the
far simpler task of rescuing a dozen prisoners. And like The Deer Hunter, the
film's motivation centers on what they did to us, rather than on the more
ambiguous question of American involvement in Vietnam.
Furthermore, the mythical Green Beret of the 1960s has been transformed.
In 1968, when real lives were being lost and real atrocities committed, The
Green Berets was careful to show John Wayne restraining his bloodthirsty
South Vietnamese allies. By the 1980s-a generation distant from the real
horrors of the war-Rambo's version of valor was a muscular body that had
become a finely tuned killing machine. (During the years when the war was
actually fought, Stallone himself was spending his draft-age years teaching at
a private girl's school in Switzerland, studying drama in Miami, and acting in
a soft-core porn film titled The Party at Katy and Stud's.)
In part, the passage of time and fading memories made it possible for a
wide audience to accept Rambo's fantastic myths. Americans no longer had
to face the war every night on the news. But greater distance had also drained
the political debate of its old divisiveness. That opened the door, by 1986, to
a very different film about Vietnam. The director of Platoon, Oliver Stone,
had served in Vietnam for :fifteen months and had been wounded twice.
Returning home, he wrote a screenplay about the war, but in 1976 no one
would produce it. A decade later, producers were willing to take the risk.
Platoon became one of the first commercially successful films to look at
the war itself; to see Vietnam as history. As the opening credits roll, Chris
Taylor (Charlie Sheen) steps
out of the giant maw of a cargo Platoon became one ofthe first
plane into the oppressive heat of commercially successful films to look at
Vietnam. But the sounds of jet the war itself; to see Vietnam as history.
engines, jeeps, and airport clatter
are muted. Over them, a serenely sad melody fills the soundtrack, a technique
that distances us from what we are seeing. The music is Samuel Barber's
Adagio for Strings, a composition that first received widespread attention
in 1945, when it was broadcast following the announcement of Franklin
Roosevelt's death. In Platoon, its elegiac melody mourns men and times past,
a feeling reinforced by an epigraph on the screen: "Rejoice, 0 young men in
thy youth." Taken from the Bible's book of Ecclesiastes, the words are not
those of celebration but of warning, spoken by one whose youth has long
vanished. ("I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all
is vanity and a striving after wind.") As Taylor and other Gis cross the run­
way, they see the body bags of dead servicemen being loaded into the plane,
heading home-those who have striven, perhaps, in vain.
At first, Platoon's format seems much like the old World War II dramas,
with their ethnic mix of soldiers learning the hard lessons of war. But this
is Vietnam, and Platoon recognizes the differences. We meet Bunny, the
violent redneck who takes bites out of beer cans; Rhah, the tough-minded
Puerto Rican; King, a black draftee from the rural hills of Tennessee; Lerner,
 Where Trouble Comes 443

a naive white recruit; Junior, a street-smart black soldier from the urban
north; and Chris Taylor-the observer, newcomer, and college-educated odd
man out who has volunteered for service. Because of the war's duty rotation
system, recruits stayed in Vietnam for only one year. Thus the composition
of :fighting units was constantly changing, as each "grunt" in the field served
out his 365 days and departed. Under such a system, morale was difficult to
maintain, since newcomers were treated as greenhorns whose mistakes were
likely to get the old hands killed. And the old hands had every incentive to
duck tough assignments that might send them home in a body bag.
Platoon also dramatizes the anguish of :fighting in Vietnam. Taylor is tor­
mented by ants that crawl over him; he faints from the heat and humidity of
a hard march; he stares anxiously into a rainy, impenetrable dark, trying to
spot the invisible enemy. Then on New Year's Day 1968, the platoon comes
upon an enemy bunker complex. At the center of the jungle camp a fire
still burns-evidently the VC have fled only moments earlier. Sergeant Elias
(Willem Dafoe) probes a tunnel complex, inching along in the dark, hoping
not to be blown away by a waiting guerrilla. Others in the platoon are spread
out along the camp's perimeter, each nervous about being isolated. Suddenly
a booby trap explodes, killing a soldier.
From out of the jungle the men march to a village. The VC have retreated
here, haven't they? Along the way, another soldier is found brutally murdered,
leaving the platoon in a dangerous mood. The villagers go placidly about
their farmwork; yet the Americans realize that at the very least the hamlet's
residents have been helping the guerrillas, and perhaps are VC themselves.
The scar-faced Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) stalks angrily through the
settlement, finding concealed ammunition, herding some of the women into
a pigpen. Taylor flushes one man from a bunker and, temporarily enraged,
shoots at the feet of a peasant, making him dance in fear. Then Bunny crushes
the man's skull with his rifle butt. Outside, other women and children are
crying as Barnes questions the village's headman. The hysteria, the fear, and
the rage clearly upset the men, who are on the verge of opening fire indis­
criminately. Sergeant Barnes shoots one woman who has been yelling at him,
then points his rifle at the headman's daughter and is about to execute her
when Elias physically attacks him and tells him to stop. Barnes backs off, but
fixes Elias with a steely eye. "You're dead," he says. The platoon's lieutenant
gives the order to torch the village, and then the soldiers move out.
What makes this sequence remarkable is that unlike The Green Berets, The
Deer Hunter, or Rambo's fantasies-even unlike Apocalypse Now-it provides
an answer to a question that is at bottom historical rather than mythical.
What we see unfolding before us is My Lai-or rather, a My Lai in the mak­
ing, averted only because Sergeant Elias steps in. But because the film has fol­
lowed the platoon's mission over the course of several months, we are seeing
the incident in context-a context that closely mirrored the Vietnam experi­
ence of many American Gls. The trauma of Vietnam becomes not merely a
question of what they did to us. Nor is it even a question of what we did to
them, which is the equally distorted reverse-angle perspective. Platoon makes
444 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

it easier to see that in a civil war,where the civilian population is divided,war

becomes an ambiguous,dangerous occupation,especially for foreigners who
understand little of Vietnamese culture.The women who protest "No VC!
No VC!" may be cooking enough rice to feed an entire unit hiding nearby,
and the children who accept candy from Gls and call out "Okay!Okay!" may
turn around and lob a grenade."I used to like kids," said Herbert Carter,one
of the soldiers at My Lai,"but I can't stand them any more."
In a war in which territory was never gained permanently,how could vic­
tory be measured? Body counts were one way. "Anything that's dead and
isn't white is a VC," went one Army joke making the rounds. A member of
Charlie Company recalled being shocked,shortly after he arrived in Vietnam,
to see a troop carrier drive by with "about twenty human ears tied to the
antenna." Even Lyndon Johnson could not resist exhorting troops in Viet­
nam to "come home with the coonskin on the wall." When Gls began to
measure victory in terms of bodies counted, when friend and foe looked
alike, and when more than a half dozen men in Charlie Company had been
killed by exploding booby traps, the ingredients for trouble simmered. "It
just started building," recalled Ronald Grzesik. "I don't know why. Every­
body reached the point where they were frustrated....I remember writing
a letter home saying that I once had sympathy for these people, but now I
didn't care." Two days before My Lai, Gregory Olsen, a devout Mormon
in Charlie Company, wrote his father about what happened after another
booby trap incident:

It all turned out a bad day made even worse. On their way back to "Dotti"
[other members of the company] saw a woman working in the :fields. They
shot and wounded her. Then they kicked her to death and emptied their mag­
azines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across.
Why in God's name does this have to happen? These are all seemingly nor­
mal guys; some were friends of mine. For a while they were like wild animals.
It was murder, and I'm ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything
about it.
This isn't the :first time, Dad. I've seen it many times before. I don't know
why I'm telling you all this; I guess I just want to get it off my chest.

To its credit,Platoon reflects these realities.Yet it reaches no hard conclu­

sions about the issues it raises.Having made reference to My Lai,the scene
in the hamlet ends with an image of American innocence.Against the back­
drop of burning huts,the platoon escorts frightened villagers to safety. Gls
who moments earlier were ready to murder and rape now cradle children in
their arms-just as,at the real My Lai,Colonel Medina and Lieutenant Cal­
ley shared cookies and crackers with two girls from the village. Repeatedly,
Platoon returns to this tension between good and evil. During another mis­
sion, the violent Barnes makes good his threat to kill the saintly Elias.The
mythical overtones are strong: with a church in the background, Elias dies
like Christ, his arms stretched out as if in crucifixion. But here, good and
evil do not boil down to us versus them.The good Elias is every bit as much
 Where Trouble C<m1es 445

The amoral Sergeant Hames (Tom Berenger) threatens to kill a young villager
in Platoon. Contrast this scene with the one ofJohn Wayne in The Green Berets on
page 42 7. The events at My Lai have obviously altered dramatically the cinematic
images of Americans at war in an ambiguous conflict.

a soldier as the evil Barnes. The experience of My Lai has forced Platoon
to give up the myth of American exceptionalism-that Americans are more
virtuous, thanks to their special circumstances. Americans must wrestle with
the evil within themselves, as all people do.
Elias as a Christ figure, Barnes as an amoral realist ... these are mytho­
logical and dramatic-rather than historical-concepts. But they reflect the
circumstances of the war in far different ways than do the myths of The Green
Berets or Sands oflwo Jima.P/atocm's ambiguities reveal the difficulty of impos­
ing traditional myths on Vietnam, a war that demanded myths of its own.
In the end, it will not do to say that Platoon is better history than The
Green Berm-although most historians might conclude that it more accu­
rately portrays the conditions of the war Myths of the cinema will always
.

reflect the needs of drama more than the requirements of historical evidence.
For their part, historians must remain faithful to their own creed: to examine
the images of the silver screen rationally and with the same skepticism they
bring to any primary or secondary source.
But is a rational, skeptical approach enough? ff truth be told, people do
not often make love or die for their country on rational grounds alone. The
best history recognizes those deep-seated emotions that myths address. For
that reason we have examined not only the facts of My Lai but the more
intangible effects the event has had on our self-image as a nation. In their
446 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION

eagerness to become mythmakers for the millions, the magicians of Hol­

lywood have offered us not one but many myths with which to shape our
lives. The power of history to undertake a reasoned analysis of the past
offers hope-and perhaps a method by which we may come to appreciate the
authentic truths that the best myths reveal.
Return one last time to Son My. As historians, we cannot expunge the
painful record of what took place, but it may be worth repeating that My Lai
stood as an extreme of the American experience in Vietnam. If the booby
traps, the ambushes, the frustrations of an unseen enemy worked on all sol­
diers, not all chose to behave in the same way, even at My Lai.
POV, above the hamlet in an observation helicopter: Chief Warrant Officer Hugh
Thompson, of Decatur, Georgia, is sweeping the area. He spots a wounded
girl by the side of a rice paddy and decides to mark her location with a smoke
grenade so that the men on the ground can provide medical help. Thompson is
astonished to see a captain walk over to the girl and shoot her. Turning north,
Thompson sees a small boy bleeding along a trench and marks his location
with smoke. Casually, a lieutenant walks up and empties a clip into the child.
Beside himself with anger, Thompson tries to contact ground forces.
When he cannot get through, he radios a loud protest to brigade headquar­
ters. Then, circling over the hamlet's outskirts, he sees a canal ditch with "a
bunch of bodies in it." A pilot nearby is reminded of"the old Biblical story of
Jesus turning water into wine. The trench had a grey color to it, with the red
blood of the individuals." Thompson spots some children still alive among
the mass of bodies. Nearly frantic, he lands his small chopper and picks up a
child about two years old, dazed with shock. He calls in another gunship for
a dozen more youngsters. In the air once again, he sights the same lieutenant
who shot the child he had marked earlier. The lieutenant-Thompson later
identifies him as Calley-is in the process of destroying a bunker in which
women and children are huddled.
This time Thompson lands, gets out of the chopper, stalks over to Cal­
ley, and tells him to remove the civilians. The only way to get them out,
responds Calley, is to use hand grenades. "You just hold your men right
here," Thompson retorts angrily, "and I will get the women and kids out."
Thompson orders one of the waist gunners in his chopper to aim his machine
gun"at that officer" and shoot if he tries to interfere. Then Thompson walks
back and places himself physically between Calley's troops and the women
and children, until a chopper arrives to evacuate them.
For his actions, Thompson was belatedly awarded the Distinguished Fly­
ing Cross. The curious historian may consult the citation in army records;
it is less than direct in describing the conditions under which Thompson
had been "disregarding his own safety." It notes only that he found the
children "between Viet Cong positions and advancing friendly forces." As
usual, the raw material of the past is neither as clear-cut nor as comforting
as the larger-than-life deeds of the cinema. It remains for historians, sifting
through such telltales, to fashion narratives that are worth not only dying
for, but living with.
 Where Trouble Comes 447

Additional Reading

All the films we discuss are available on videocassette and DVD. For broader
coverage of the films of Vietnam, see Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How
the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York, 1988); Linda
Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam
War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); and Pat Aufflerheide,
"Vietnam: Good Soldiers," in Mark Crispin Miller, ed., Seeing through Movies
(New York, 1990). A number of compelling documentary films about Viet­
nam are worth viewing. Hearts and Minds (1974) illustrates how the format
can convey a highly interpretive message; Vietnam: A Television History (1983)
is a thorough thirteen-part series originally aired on the Public Broadcast­
ing System (PBS). Both pay far more attention to the Vietnamese side of
the war than most American accounts do. Another PBS series, Frontline, has
examined the My Lai incident in Remember My Lai (WGBH Television,
1989). Two edited collections allow readers to engage for themselves the
issues raised by My Lai and the Vietnam War. David Anderson, ed., Facing
My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre (Lawrence, KS, 1998), gathered a distin­
guished group of historians, military people, veterans, and journalists for a
conference on My Lai; this book contains their perspectives on the massacre
and its meaning. James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, eds., My Lai: A Brief
History with Documents (New York, 1999), gathered primary materials about
the event.
The number of books on the war itself is vast. Robert Schulzinger, A
Time for War: The United States in Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York, 1997),
covers the American side, while Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars,
1945-1990 (New York, 1991), pays more attention to the Vietnamese con­
text. A judicious introduction is George Herring's America's Longest War:
The United States in Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4th ed. (New York, 2001). Michael
Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation ofAmerica's Most Disas­
trous Military Conflict (New York, 2002), rejects both liberal and conservative
interpretations of the war. Finally, Robert Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam?
2d ed. (New York, 2009), explores a much debated question.
This page intentionally left blank
Credits
Prologue
p. xix: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. xxviii: The
Art Archive/Bibliotheque des Arts
Decoratifs Paris/Gianni Dagli Orti.
Chapter 1
p. 2: © Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis;
p. 4: Courtesy of the author; p. 10:
© Darling Kindersley/Getty Images;
p. 13: Courtesy of Dr. Jeffrey M.
Mitchem, Arkansas Archeological
Survey; p. 14: Courtesy of the John
Carter Brown Library at Brown
University.; p. 16: South Carolina
State Museum; p. 24: The National
Library of MedicineNisual Image
Presentations; p. 27: The Granger
Collection, New York.
Chapter 2
p. 34: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 42: Neimeyer
Tabaksmuseum, Groningen, The
Netherlands; p. 47: Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division.
Chapter 3
p. 62: Yale University, Sterling
Memorial Library; p. 72: By
permission of The British Library
(Add. 32496 f. 51).
Chapter4
p. 76: Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division [LC-USZC62-
3736]; p. SOL: Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division,
LC-USZ62-49950; p. SOR: Library
of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, LC-USZ62-12S740;
p. SS: Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-
S549; p. 95: Public Domain.
Chapter 5
p. 9S: Photograph courtesy of
the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial
Association, Memorial Hall Museum,
Deerfield, MA. All rights reserved.
(Acc. no. 1960.17); p. 99L: Rare Books
Division, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations; p. 99R: Rare Books
Division, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations; p. 100: Photograph
courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association, Memorial
Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA. (Acc.
no. 1S97.09); p. 103: Photograph
courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association, Memorial
Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA. (Acc.
no. 1999.13.507); p. 104: John Lewis
Krimmel, "Quilting Frolic," 1S13.
Courtesy, Winterthur Museum,
449
450 CREDITS
DE. (Acc. no. 1953.0178.002);
p. 105: Old Sturbridge Village, MA
(Acc. no. B29098); p. 106:John Lewis
Krimmel, "Quilting Frolic" (detail),
1813. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum,
DE. (Acc. no. 1953.0178.002); p. 107:
Courtesy of Historic Deerfield,
Photograph by Amanda Merullo. (Acc.
no. 1998.35); p. 108: Hannah Barnard.
Press Cupboard, c. 1710. The Henry
Ford, Dearborn, ML (36.178.1);
p. 110: Courtesy of Historic Deerfield.
Photograph by Amanda Merullo. (Acc.
no. 56.140); p. 116: Old Sturbridge
Village, MA; p. 117: Old Sturbridge
Village, MA; p. 118: "There Is No
School Like the Family School," from
The Mother's Assistant and Young
Lady's Friend.
Chapter6
p. 126L: Collection of The University
of Wisconsin-Madison Archives;
p. 126R: The Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA (Box 58 #16);
p. 132: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 136: Thomas
Scully, "AndrewJackson,"
c. 1857. Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 139:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 144: Photo
courtesy of Edward E. Ayer Collection,
The Newberry Library, Chicago.
Chapter7
p. 15 0: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 152:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 154: Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 155: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division;
p. 164: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 167L:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 167R:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division.
Chapter 8
p. 172: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 174:
JohnJacob Omenhausser, "Guard
Challenging Prisoner," 1864.
© Collection of the New York Historical
Society. (ae00045); p. 176: Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 182: National Archives;
p. 191: National Archives; p. 197: Public
Domain; p. 201: American Folklife
Center, Library of Congress; p. 202:
© TRBfoto/Getty Images/PhotoDisc.
Chapter9
p. 208: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 210:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 211: Public
Domain; p. 213: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division; p.
215: William Henry Jackson, "Teton
Range," 1872. National Archives;
p. 217: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 219:
Museum of the City of New York,
TheJacob A. Riis Collection; p. 221:
Museum of the City of New York,
TheJacob A. Riis Collection; p. 222:
Museum of the City of New York,
TheJacob A. Riis Collection; p. 223:
Museum of the City of New York,
TheJacob A. Riis Collection; p. 224:
Museum of the City of New York,
TheJacob A. Riis Collection.
Chapter 10
p. 230: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 231: Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 233L: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division;
p. 233R: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 235:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 237: Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 239: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division;
p. 240: Scientific American, November

7, 1891/ Yale University, Sterling
Memorial Library; p. 245: Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division.
Chapter 1 1
p. 257: Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division; p. 265:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 266:
National Archives; p. 267: Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 277: Ben Shahn,
"Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola
Sacco," from the Sacco-Vanzetti
series. 1931-1932. Gift of Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller. The Museum
of Modern Art, New Yark, NY
(144.1935). Digital Image ©The
Museum of Modern Art/Licensed
by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Art .
©Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY .
Chapter 12
p. 285: Kansas State Historical Society;
p. 286: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 287L: Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; p. 287R: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division;
p. 304: Courtesy of The Bancroft
Library, University of California,
Berkeley. (1945.007:4); p. 305:
Copyright the Dorothea Lange
collection, Oakland Museum of
California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul
S. Taylor. (Acc. no. A67.137.7876); p.
307: Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division.
Chapter 13
p. 311: National Archives; p. 317:
Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division; p. 326L:
National Archives; p. 326R: National
Archives; p. 331: National Archives;
p. 332: National Archives; p. 334:
National Archives.
CREDITS 451
Chapter 14
p. 341: ©Nina Leen/Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images; p. 347: Printed
by permission of the Norman Rockwell
Family Agency. Copyright c. 1943 the
Norman Rockwell Family Entities;
p. 349: ©1956 SEPS: Licensed by
Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. All
rights reserved. www.curtispublishing.
com; p. 358: Everett Collection; p. 360:
Everett Collection.
Chapter 15
p. 369: ©Jack Moebes/CORBIS;
p. 376: News & Record/ News
& Record Staff; p. 380: ©1966,
OPUBCO Communications Group;
p. 381: Photo by Bill Goodman from the
Nashville Banner Archives, property of
the Nashville Public Library; p. 389:
©Danny Lyon/ Magnum Photos;
p. 391: ©Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 392:
March on Washington (Program),
08/28/1963; Bayard Rustin Papers;
John F. Kennedy Library; National
Archives and Records Administration.
Chapter 16
p. 397: AP Images; p. 402: Jimilu
Mason, "On the Run." LBJ Library
Collection. Photograph by Frank
Wolfe. ©1961 JIMILU Mason,
sculptor. All rights reserved; p.
406: National Archives; p. 410: ©
Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 411:
©Bettmann/CORBIS.
Chapter 17
p. 427: BATJAC PRODS/THE
KOBAL COLLECTION; p. 433:
©Ronald L. Haeberle/Time & Life
Pictures Getty Images; p. 436L:
©Universal/courtesy Everett
Collection; p. 436R: ©EMU
COLUMBIA/WARNERS/THE
KOBAL COLLECTION; p. 441:
ZOETROPE/UNITED ARTISTS/
THE KOBAL COLLECTION;
p. 445: ©Orion/courtesy Everett
Collection.

reorganization and mechanization
of,294-295
timekeeping in,110
in time of De Soto expedition, 15
in the Virginia Colony, 41-42,
43-44
Aiken,John,260
Alcohol,in the Virginia Colony,45
Algonquian Indians,35
Alland,Alexander,203-204,226
Allison,David, 135
Allison,Graham,335
All the President's Men (Woodward and
Bernstein),419
Alperovitz,Gar,319-320,335
"An Alphabet of Joyous Trusts"
(Opper),239
Ambrose,Stephen,417,419
American Beauty (Banner),364
American character,in frontier thesis,
128-129
American exceptionalism,426,435,
440,445
An American Exodus: A Record of
Human Erosion (Lange and
Taylor),288,309
American Exodus: The Dust Bowl
Migration and Okie Culture in
California (Gregory),309
American History, American Television
(O'Connor),364
American Indians. See Native
Americans
American Prometheus: The Triumph
and Tragedy ofJ. Robert
Oppenheimer (Bird and
Sherwin),335-336
American Scripture: Making the
Declaration ofIndependence
(Maier), 97
The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography (Rawick),200
American Slavery, American Freedom
(Morgan),50
Americas. See also De Soto expedition
Columbian exchange,8-9,26
diseases brought with contact,
22-25
ecosystems in time of De Soto,
5,7-8
INDEX 453
ecosystems in time of La Salle,
18-19,26
environment descriptions of,7-8
historical view of European
contact,5-6
population size questions,19-22
America's Longest War (Herring),447
Amos 'n' Andy, 355,355n
Anarchism,260,268-269,278
Anderson,David,447
Anderson,D. K., xxxii
Anderson,G. T., xxxii
Anderson,Maxwell, 277
Anderson,Oscar,335
Andover,Massachusetts,witchcraft
in,68,70
Andrews,Lola,261
Anhayca,14-15
Anti-Semitism,266,278,413-414
Apocalypse Now (film),435,439-441
Apprentices,in the Virginia colony,44
Argall,Samuel,38,41,44
Armour,]. Odgen,241,255
Arnaz,Desi,358
Arnett,Peter,437-438
Arquebuses,13
Asian Americans,302-308
As Seen on TV (Marling),364
Atlantic Monthly, 129,276,281
Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story
ofLittle Boy and Fat Man
(Coster-Mullen), 337-338
The Atomic Bomb and the End of World
War II (Feis),335
Atomic bomb decision,310-336
bomb design,316-318,320-321,
325-328
bomb production,327,331,333
bureaucratic politics model in,
327-334
concern for postwar Soviet Union
conduct and,318-319,
326,330
disclosure to Stalin,322
initial fission research,315-316,325
Interim Committee
recommendations,321-322
military and,324-325,328-329
nonmilitary demonstration option,
321,330-331
454 INDEX
Atomic bomb decision,
310-336-Cont.
organization process model in,
323-327
postwar arms race from,320,322,
330
rational actor theory in,314-322
sequence of events in,313-314
surrender terms and,319,329
target selection and bombing,
331-333
test explosions,310-311,312,334
uranium 235 refining,316,327
Atomic Diplomacy (Alperovitz),335
Audubon,John James,8,27
Aufflerheide,Pat,447
Auster,Albert,447
Avrich,Paul,280,281
Ayll6n,Lucas Vazquez de,22
Baby tender,98-99,101-102
BAI (Bureau of Animal Industry),243,
247,252
Baker,Ella,388-389
Baker,Howard,397
Ball,Lucille,356,358
Bancroft, Edward
Deane's death and,xxix-xxxi
as Deane's friend,xx, xxiv-xxviii
as a double agent,xxvi-xxviii
Banking houses,101
Banner,Lois,364
Barber,Samuel,442
Barbour,Philip,32
Barker,Frank,421
Barnard,Hannah,108-109
Barnouw,Eric,364
Barry,Marion,382
Baseball game, hypothetical
eyewitness account of,33,36
Bayley,James,66-67
Beals,Jessie Tarbox,218n
Bean,Russell,131-132
Becker, Carl,79,87,97
Bed curtains,101,102
Beef Trust,234. See also Meatpacking
industry
Been in the Stonn So Long
(Litwack),200
Berardelli,Alessandro,256,261,262
Berenger,Tom,443,445
Berlin,Ira,49,50,200
Bernhardt,Michael,431
Bernstein,Barton,328,335
Bernstein, Carl,419
Beschloss,Michael,403,404,419
Betty Friedan and the Making of
"The Feminine Mystique"
(Horowitz),364
Betty Friedan: The Personal Is Political
(Oliver),364
Bevel,James,370,382
Beveridge,Albert,232,236,244-248,
251-253
Bierstadt,Albert,207
Bing,Ah, 302-303
Bipolar disorder,in John Brown,
159-160,165-168
Bird,Kai,335
Birthrates after World War II,
346-347
Bishop,Bridget,55,59
Bison,26
Bixby,Emerson,116-117,119,120
Black Muslims,393
Black Panthers,394
Black Power,393-394
Blair,Ezell,373,374
Blair,Ezell,Jr.,366-369,373-376
Blassingame,John,180,200
Blount,William,135
Blumin,Stuart M.,122
Boda,Mike,256-257,281
Bohr,Niels,330
Bombing of Japan. See Atomic bomb
decision
Bond,Julian,369,388
Born on the Fourth ofJuly (film),424
Boss Politics (Tarr),254
Boston (Sinclair),277
Boston Herald, 276
Boston Port Bill,86
Botkin,Benjamin,180
"Bottle Alley" (Riis),223-224
Botts,Lawson,153,156
Boyd,Julian,xxii-xxiii,xxvii,xxxi
Boyer, Charles,358,365
Boyer,Paul,65-68,74
Brady,Matthew,208,212
Brasch,Walter,254

The Brass Check (Sinclair),254
Breen,T. H.,122
Brewer,John,122
Briggs, Lyman, 325
Brigham,Robert,447
British,fear of slave insurrection
incited by,93-94
Broadstreet,John,70
Brookings Institution,405-406,
408-409,414
Broomcorn,109
Brooms,109
Brotherhood of the Bomb (Herken),336
Brother President (Luper),379
Broun, Heywood, 278
Brown, Christopher,70
Brown,John,148-170
abolitionists on,148,150-151,
153,158
bipolar diagnosis of,159-160,
165-168
early business failures of,157
execution of,153
Harpers Ferry raid by,149
as idealis� 152-153
image of,150,164,167
insanity debate,148,152-153,156
insanity implications,148,157
insanity in family of,154-155,
156,159
legal sanity of,156,157-158
martyrdom of,151-152,153,154
origin of abolitionism of,162,164
polarizing effect of,149-151
Pottawatomie Creek attack by,155
religious nature of,163-164,
166-167
Stearns letter on childhood of,
160-163,165-166
as terrorist,155
testimony of,151-152
"Brown of Ossawatomie"
(Whittier),154
Brown v. Board ofEducation of Topeka,
366,379
Buchanan,James,149
Buckley,Tom,438n
Buffalo,26
Bundy,McGeorge,335
Bureaucratic politics model,327-334
INDEX 455
Bureau of Agricultural Economics,297
Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI),
243,247,252
Burroughs,George,54,66-67,69
Bush,Vannevar,316,325,327
Bushman,Richard,111,114,122
Butler,Jessie,187,190
Butterfield,Alexander,398,400,402
Byrnes,James,329-330
Cabeza de Vaca,Alvar NU:fiez,7
Calamanco,105
California
agricultural labor immigration to,
291-296,299
agricultural reorganization and
consolidation in,294-295
census of 1940 on migrants to,
292-296
demographics of immigrants to,
297-298
hardships in agricultural camps,
300-302
journey of Okies to,298-300
multicultural agricultural workforce
in,302-308
Calley,William,430-432,434,444, 446
Campaign imagery,233
Campbell,Julia,261
Candles,113-114
Cannon,Joseph,250
Capps,William,43,46
Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of
His Writings (Kupperman),50
Carding mills,115
Caribbean, slavery in,49
Carney,Art, 360
Carpets, 112,118
Carroll, Kenneth, 158-159, 166,168
Carson, Clayborne, 390,395
Carter,Herbert,444
The Case ofSacco and Vanzetti
(Frankfurter),281
The Case That Will Not Die
(Ehrmann),281
Cather,Willa,342
Caulfield,Ernest,60
Caveat emptor doctrine,243
Census of 1890,126,140
Census of 1940,292-296,297
456 INDEX

Chafe,William,345,372,395 children in,384-385

Chair rails,113 communication in,383,386
Chamber pots,102,103 continuity in,371-372,
Change and Continui-ty in Twentieth 373-376,387
Century America (Braeman desegregation efforts during and
et al.), 254 after World War II,378
"Changing works," 105 economic power and,383-384
Chaplin,John,171 insurgent consciousness in,
Charcot,J. M.,62 384,387
Chase,Salmon,152 Journey of Reconciliation,379
Checkers speech of Nixon,410-411 Luper and,379-381,384-385
Cherokees,143 March on Washington (1963),
Chesnut,Mary,176,193 372,390-393
Chiaha settlement,15-16 Montgomery bus boycott (1955),
Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, 374,379,383-384
316,321,322,330 for "nontraditional" jobs,375
Chicago World's Columbian Raleigh convention (1960),388
Exposition,124,126 sit-ins after Greensboro,368-371
Chickasaw Indians,144 social movement formation,
Chicken pox,23 376-382
Children spontaneity and discontinuity in,
in civil rights actions,384-385 371,372-373
day care for,344 student-led phase of,385-387
female characters in cartoons Student Nonviolent Coordinating
and,353 Committee,372,387-393
modeling of behaviors in,352 voter registration in Mississippi,
in urban poverty,206,220-221 389-390
China dishes,107 Clarke,John,252
Chinese Americans,302-303 Classical explanatory models,377
Chinese Exclusion Act,303 Clocks,109-111,118
Cholera,25 Coal fires,118
Churchill,Sarah,63 Co:fitachequi settlement,15-16,
Churchill,Winston,310-311,320 22-23
Cigar makers,217-218 Coley,Nell,374
Cimino,Michael,435-439,438n Colson,Charles,408
Cities The Columbia History ofAmerican
population growth in, 204,206,206n Television (Edgerton),364
tenements in, 204-205, 219, Columbian exchange, 8-9,26
221-223 Columbian Exposition,Chicago,
urban culture in American history, 124,126
137-138 Comans,Richard,59
"The City in American History" Commando Mary,343
(Schlesinger,Sr.),137-138 Commerce,government regulation of,
Civilities and Civil Rights (Chafe), 395 242-243
Civil Rights Act (1964),372,393 Committee of Five,76,77
Civil rights movement,366-395. Communism,fear of,268-269
See also Greensboro lunch Compartmentalization of information,
counter sit-in 325-326
Black Muslims,393-394 The Complete Photographic Work of
Black Panthers,394 Jacob Riis (Doherty),226
 INDEX 457

Compton,Arthur,321 Cupboards, 108-109,119

Conant,James,316
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
370,378-379,388
Connolly, Michael, 257,269
Conrad,Joseph, 440
Consumption and the World of Goods
(Brewer and Porter), 122
Continuity interpretation,
371-376,387
Conversion hysteria, 60-63,64,125
Cooper,Esther,105
Coppola, Francis Ford,435,439-441
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality),
370,378-379,388
Corn, ease of growing, 41
Corner moldings,113
Corporate arrogance, Progressive
reforms and,239-241
Cortes,Hernan,6,23
Cory,Giles,55
Cory, Martha,55
Coster-Mullan,John,337-338
Cotton, 301
Cotton gin, 115
Courtesy books,111-112
Court system
appeals process in 1920,274
Supreme Court refusal to review
Sacco and Vanzetti case,274
task of deciding evidence of guilt,
263-264
Coverlids,112
Currency,45,133-134,135
Cut nails, 101
Cutting,John,xx-xxi,xxii,xxix
Cyclotron, 313
Czitrom, Daniel, 226
Czolgosz, Leon,268
Dafoe, Willem,443
Daguerre,Jacques,207
Dahl, Robert, 377
Dale,Thomas,8
D'Allesandro, Frank,281
Daly, William,273,274
Danger and Survival (Bundy), 335
Dark Sweat, White Gold (Weber),309
Darwin, Charles,127
Davenport, Charlie,199
Davis,Jefferson,194
Davis,Nuel Pharr,336
Dean,John
in Brookings Institution action, 409
in Watergate coverup, 399,414,
416-417
Watergate testimony of,397
Deane, Silas,xvii-xxxii
Bancroft and,xxiv-xxviii
death of,xx-xxi,xxviii-xxxi
outline of life of,xviii-xx
on plans for the future,xxiii
"The Death of Silas Deane"
(Anderson and Anderson),
XXXll

Cox, Archibald, 398 Debt bondage,51

Coxe, Tench, 115 Decision-making models. See also
Creek Indians,Jackson's war against, Atomic bomb decision
142,143 bureaucratic politics model,
Creel,George, 265 327-334
Crevecoeur, Hector St. John de,129 organizational process model,
Crocker,George,271 323-327
Cronon,William,254 rational actor model,313-322
Crosby, Alfred,8 The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
Crumpacker,E. D.,248 (Alperovitz),335
Crunden, Robert,254 Declaration of Independence,
Cuban missile crisis, 401 75-96
Cult of domesticity,116 contemporary events during
Cultural evolution theory, 127 drafting of,89-92
Cultural mixing, in the frontier, dates of,78
141-142,143 drafting and signing of,76-80
Cultures in Contact (Fitzhugh), 50 grievances listed in,84
458 INDEX

Declaration of Independence, Diffusion theory,386

7 5-96-Cont. Digital cameras,227
insurgent consciousness in,384 Dining habits,106-108
intellectual worlds behind,86-89 Diphtheria,25
justification of revolution in, Diseases
83-84 in California agricultural
Lee's resolutions in,77-78,84 migrants,301
"pursuit of Happiness" phrase in, European contact with the
89,90 Americas and,22-25
slavery and,90-92 in tenements,204-205
Stamp Act Congress declaration transmission of,24-25
compared with,84-86 in the Virginia Colony,41
text of,81-83 Dittmar,Linda,447
The Declaration ofIndependence: A Study Divorce rate after World War II,346n
in the History ofPolitical Ideas Documentary photography. See
(Becker),97 Photography
The Deer Hunter (:film),435-439 Documentary records,102
De la Cruz,Jessie,306 Document interpretation
Democracy,the frontier and,128-129 contemporary events and,89-92
Democratic Party,234,250 intellectual worlds in,86-89
De Niro,Robert,435-436 language context in,86-87
De Soto,Hernando Nixon's Watergate tapes and,
death of,1-3,4,17 404-409
early life of,6-7 omissions in,84-86
journey in North America,7, problems of evidence in,75
8-10 reading for surface content,81-84
last will and testament of,1 Dogs,European contact and,9
on previous plagues,22-23 Doherty,Robert].,226
The De Soto Chronicles (Clayton "The Domestic Insurrections
et al.),30 of the Declaration of
De Soto expedition Independence" (Kaplan),97
clothing in,2 Domesticity,cult of,116
diseases and,22-25 Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life
environment descriptions of,7-8 (Meltzer),309
hogs in,3,10,25 Dos Passos,John,279
horses and dogs in,9 Douglas,Ann,364
interactions with Native Americans, Douglas,Stephen,150
12-18 Douglas,Susan,364
population density encountered, Douglass,Frederick,151
2-3 Doyle,William,419
route of,10-12 DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical
survivors of,18 Manual ofMental Disorders),
Detective cameras,209 159-160, 165-167
Diagrwstic and Statistical Manual of DuBois,W. E. B.,179
Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), Dunmore, Governor,91,93,95
159-160,165-167 Dunmore's Proclamation,91,92-94
Diaries,as documentary records, Dunn,Arthur,421
102,104 Dunn,Richard,49
Dibble,Jenner,72 Dunne,Finley Peter,237
Dickinson,John,76 Dunning,John,327

Dunning, WilliamA, 178-179,193,195
Dust Bowl, 2 84-3 09
agricultural reorganization during,
294-295,296
arrival of Okies in California,
300-302
causes of, 285-286
demographics of migrants, 297-298
experience of, 284-285
extent of area of, 290-291
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck),
286-288,291,298-300,
301-302,307-308,309
migration to California during,
291-296,298-300
multicultural workforce in
California, 306-308
photographs taken during, 213,
288-290
Dust Bowl Migrants in the American
Imagination (Shindo), 309
The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in
the 1930s (Worster), 309
Duty boys, 44,45-46
Duvall, Robert, 439
Dyson, Freeman, 129
Eastman, George, 209,212
E. C. Knight case, 243
Ecology, human culture and, 5
Economics, slavery and, 49
Ecosystems
Columbian exchange and, 8-9,26
in European colonies, 8
human culture in, 5
introduction of pigs into, 25
keystone predators, 28-29
outbreak populations after
epidemics, 27-28
in time of De Soto, 5,7-8
in time of La Salle, 18-19,26
Edgerton, Gary, 364
Edison, Thomas, 312
Education of slaves, 174-175
Edward Bancroft's Narrative of the
Objects and Proceedings ofSilas
Deane (Ford), xxxi
Edwards, Richard, 195
Ehrlichman, John, 396,405,406,
409,418
INDEX 459
Ehrmann, Herbert, 281
Einstein, Albert, 315
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 400
Eli Terry, 110
Ellis, Joseph, 89
Ellsberg, Daniel, 396,414
"Embalmed" meat scandals, 236-237
The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social
Experience in the American
Chy (Blumin), 122
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 150-151
Emery, Sarah, 100
Enlightenment philosophers, 87-89
Entertaining rooms, 113
Enung, 51
Epidemics. See Diseases
Equality, 90-92,153
The Era of Theodore Roosevelt
(Mowry), 254
Ervin, Sam, 396-397
Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt
of 1692 (Godbeer), 74
Escobedo rights, 259
Escott, Paul D., 200
An Essay on the Natural History of
Guiana in South America
(Bancroft), xxiv, xxxi
The Essence ofDecision: &plaining the
Cuban Missile Crisis (Allison
and Zelikow), 335
Evans, Walker, 213
Evidence
archaeological, 5,13
in the court system, 263-264
in document interpretation, 75
evaluation of, 31
Nixon's tapes as, 404-409
selection of, in photography,
208,212
spectral, 55,56
Evolution theory, 127
Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights
Years, 1954-1965
(Williams), 395
Eyewitness accounts, accuracy of,
32-35
Facing My Lai (Anderson), 447
Factories in the Fields (McWilliams), 309
Facts, point of view in, 35-36
460 INDEX
Fair Employment Practices
Commission, 390
Families
mothers-in-law, 361-362
nuclear vs. extended, 119
size of, 119
in urban tenements, 217-220,
221-223
working mothers and, 344-345
in World War II, 345
Fanton, Jonathan, 335
Farmer, James, 371
Farm Security Administration (FSA)
medical care and relief from, 302
photographers of, 203,213-214,
286,288-290
Father Knows Best, 350, 351,356
Fausz, Frederick, 50
Federal Emergency Relief
Administration, 296
Federal Writers' Project (FWP),
179-183,200
Feis, Herbert, 335
Feme covert, 71
Feme sole, 71
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan),
341-342,364
The Feminization ofAmerican Culture
(Douglas), 364
Fermi, Enrico, 315,321,325
A Fierce Discontent (McGerr), 254
Filipino Americans, 304-308
Films as history. See also Vietnam War
portrayal
combat epics, 425-426
dramatic construction and,
423-425
fact-checking in, 423
myths in, 425
narrative structure in, 428-429
principles of reconstruction, 423
visual images in, 426-428
westerns, 425
The Final Days (Woodward and
Bernstein), 419
Fire insurance documents, 102
Fireplaces, decrease in size of,
113,118
First Blood (film), 440-441
First Blood, Part 2 (film), 441-442
Fisk University, Nashville, 179
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 168
"Five Cents a Spot" (Riis), 210,
211-212,217
Floors, herringbone patterns on, 109
Florida, De Soto in, 7,11-12
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 271
Foner, Eric, 200
Food chain, 29
Food labeling, 245,247
Foot, Betty, 106
Footprints ofFour Centuries: The Story of
the American People (Mabie), 4
Forced labor, 51. See also Labor
systems; Slavery
Ford, John, 286
Ford, Paul L., xxxi
Forerunners ofRevolution (Brasch), 254
Forster, E. M., 417
Foul Means: the Fornzation ofa Slave
Society in Virginia, 1660-1740
(Parent), 50
1491: New Revelations ofthe Americas
before Columbus (Mann), 30
Franck, James, 330
Frankfurter, Felix, 270,276,281
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 176
Franklin, Benjamin
in the Committee of Five, 76,77
Declaration of Independence
alterations by, 79
Edward Bancroft and, xxiv-xxv,
XXVll
Silas Deane and, xviii, xxvii
silverplate and china of, 107
stove of, 113
Frazer, Rhone, 387
Frazier, F. Franklin, 387
Freedman's Bureau, 196
Freedman's Inquiry Commission, 178
Freedpeople
black dialect, 178,183-184
"bottom rail on top,'' 173,174
deception by, 177-178
education, desire for, 196,197
etiquette requirements, 181
land ownership by, 196-198
marriage reaffirmation by, 195
new names taken by, 194-195
oral testimony by, 178-192

race prejudice in white northerners,
177
reactions to Emancipation,
171-173,193-196
in Reconstruction,198-199
recovering memories of,173-178
religion of,178
in the Sea Islands, 172,196-197
stereotypes of,178-179,194
terminology, 173n
travel by,195
on white motives for slavery,
191-192
Free rider problem,383
Freud,Sigmund,158
Frey,Sylvia,92,97
Friedan,Betty
The Feminine Mystique,
341-342, 364
on mass media portrayal of women,
347-350
Smith questionnaire of,339-340
Frisch,Otto,316
From Daytime to Prime Time
(Roman),364
From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee
(Abernethy), 133,147
From Hanoi to Hollywood (Dittnar and
Michaud),447
From Market-Places to a Market
Economy: The Transfonnation
ofRural Massachusetts
(Rothenberg),122
From Reverence to Rape (Haskell),364
The Frontier in American History
(Turner),147
Frontier thesis of Turner
Abernethy on,133-136,145,147
criticism of,130
cultural evolution and,127-128
cultural mixing and,141-142,143
Eastern land speculators and,134
"free land" vs. conquest oflndian
lands,141
as grand theory,129-130,145
middle ground metaphor and,
143-145
"new western history" and,140-146
presentation of,126-129
Schlesinger on,138-139
INDEX 461
Frontline, 447
Front yards,117-118
Frost,Robert,283
FSA. See Farm Security
Administration
Fuller,Alvan,278
Fuller,Edward,184-187
Fustian,115
FWP (Federal Writers' Project),
179-183,200
Gadge,Sarah,54,57
Gage,General Thomas,93,94
Gallatin,Albert,132
Galleani,Luigi,268,280
Galloway,Patricia,24-25,30
Gallup,George,292,343
Gans,Herbert,352,353
Garbage,disposal of,117
Garbage in,garbage out (GIGO),333
Garraty,John,153
Garretson,Elbert,295
Gasca-Cuellar,Lillie,306
Gates,Thomas,38
Gelb,Leslie,408
Gender Advertisements (Goffman), 364
Gender roles, women workers in
World War II and,345
A Generali Historie of Virginia (Smith),
31,32
General Motors,women's jobs
in,344
Genteel behavior,111-114
The George Burns and Gracie Allen
Show, 350
Georgian brick houses,113
Gifford,George,57
GIGO (garbage in,garbage out),333
Glass panes in windows,112-113
Gleason,Jackie,360
Globus hystericus, 61
Gloucester,Massachusetts,witchcraft
in,69-70
Godbeer,Richard,74
Gods of the Lightning (Anderson), 277
Goffman,Erving,364
Good,Sarah,54,55,57,61,71
"Goody," 58n
Gookin,Daniel,19-20
Gould,Lewis,254
462 INDEX

Gould,Roy,274 Hales,Peter B.,226

Graham,Billy,412-413 Hall,David,74
Grand theory,126,129-130,145 Halls,in early American houses,112
Grant,Robert,278 Halperin,Morton,408
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), Hamilton,Susan,188-190
286-288,291,298-300, Hamlin,Susan,184-187
301-302,307-308, 309 Hampton Institute,178
The Grasslands ofNorth America Hancock,John,76,78
(Malin),309 Hansen,Chadwick,60-63,74
Graves,Dorothy,376 Harding,Anneliese,122
Greeley,Horace,151,152 Harpers Ferry raid,149-151,168-169.
The Green Berets (film),422-423, See also Brown,John
425-429,435,442 Harris,Charley,368
Greensboro,North Carolina, Harrison, William Henry
segregation in,366,375,383 "Tippecanoe," 233
Greensboro Four,366-369,373-376 Hart,Albert Bushnell,129
Greensboro lunch counter sit-in (1960) Haskell,Molly,364
communication links and,386 Hatch,Richard,46
events in,366-369 Hats, doffing, 112
as inspiration for other protests, Haymarket Square explosion of
368-371 1886,268
prior influences on Greensboro Headrights,39,44
Four,373-376 Heart ofDarkness (Conrad),440
spontaneity of,371, 372-373 Hearts and Minds (film), 447
Gregory,James,292-294,297,309 Heating homes,100-101,113,118
Grew,Joseph,329 Hemings,Sally,95
Groves,General Leslie R. Henshaw, Ruth, 105
on atomic bomb target selection, Hepburn bill, 243
331 Herken, Gregg, 336
as head of Manhattan Project, The Hernando De Soto &pedition
316,318 (Galloway),30
on hearing test results,310 Herring,George,447
Now It Can Be Told, 335 Hersh,Seymour,438
on security at Los Alamos, Hewlett,Richard,335
325-326 Heyrman,Christine,73
Grzesik,Ronald,432,444 Hine,Lewis,203
Guest worker program,282 Hiroshima,atomic bombing of,311,
Guthrie,Woody,286 312,331-333. See also Atomic
bomb decision
Hadley chests,108-109 Hiss,Alger,414
Haeberle,Ronald,432-433,435 Historians. See also Evidence; Theory
Hahn,Steven,200 allowing a part to stand for the
Haig, Alexander, 399,417 whole,290
Hairston, Otis,37 4 Atlantic Coast bias of,127
Haldeman,H. R. (Bob) census information used by,292-296
photograph of,406 on continuity in history, 371-376,
resignation of,417,418 387
Senate testimony of,397-398 difficulty studying ephemeral
in taped conversations with Nixon, media,353
399,402,405,407,414 diffusion theory,386

dilemma of bureaucratic society
to,314
on discontinuity in history,
372-373
document interpretation by,75,
80-89
on formation of social movements,
377-378,382-386
influence of contemporary issues
on,139-140
interviewers' interactions and,
181-184,187-188,190-192
little attention to women prior to
the 1970s by,342
multiple models used by,333-334
myths and,445-446 (See also
Myths)
not consumers of mass culture,
352-353
objective conclusions by,192
organizational process model and,
323-327
psychohistory and,158
rational actor model and,314-322
reassessment needs in,4-6
reconstruction by,126
on reflection hypothesis,351-352
Sacco and Vanzetti interpretation
by,264-265
scale of research projects of,52-53
selection of facts by,xxi-xxii
significance of theory to, 125-126
tangled webs and,72-73
"toprail" bias of,173-174
tree rings and,xiii-xiv
The History ofPhotography from 1839 to
the Present Day (Newhall),226
Hobbs,Abigail,69
Hofstadter,Richard,147
Hogs,3,10,25
Holmes, Oliver Wendell,207,225,
268,274
Holmes, Sherlock,118-119
Home industry,115-116
The Honeymooners, 355-356,
359-362
hooks, bell,351
Hoover,Herbert,297,349n
Hoover,]. Edgar,269,391, 415-416
Hoovervilles, 297
INDEX 463
Horowitz,Daniel,364
Horses,European contact and,6, 9, 9n
House, Colonel Edward M.,328
House Agriculture Committee,meat
inspection bill and,248-249
Household inventories,102,113
Household manufacturing, 115-116
Houses, American, 112-114,
116-117,119
Houston v. St. Louis Independent Packing
Company, 252
Howard, General 0. 0., 198
Howard University,378
Howe,Mrs. Sheldon,101
Howe, Samuel Gridley,177-178
How the Other HalfLives (Riis)
Alland's discovery of,203
Bohemian cigar makers in,
217-218
Christian moralism in,216
"Five Cents a Spot" photograph in,
210,211-212
impact of,205
need for photographs in,207
publication of,226
How the War Was Remembered (Auster
and Quart),447
Hudson,Charles,11-12,13,30
Hughes,Langston,374
Hutcheson,Francis,88-89,90
Hutchinson,Thomas,58,60
Hyde Park memorandum, 320,330
Hysteria,conversion,60-63,64,125
Ignaces Indians,7
I Love Lucy, 357-359,359n
Immigration. See also Nativism
frontier thesis and,141
literacy test for,267
Mexico border fence and,282-283
migration chains,300
of radicals,268
slum dwellers from,219-220
urban population growth from,204
to the Virginia Colony,40
Impeachment ofRichard Nixon (House
Committee on the
Judiciary), 419
Incan civilization,6,23-24
Independence, the frontier and,128
464 INDEX
Indians. See Native Americans
Indian wars, in New England, 69
Individualism, the frontier and, 128
Inflation, 133
Influenza, 25
Information revolution, 123
Ingersoll, Sarah, 63
Inheritance, by women, 71,109
Initiation rite, of John Smith, 35
"In Search of Progressivism"
(Rogers), 254
Inside the Oval Office (Doyle), 419
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black
Awakening of the 1960s
(Carson), 395
Insurance markets, speculation in,
XXV-XXVl
Insurgent consciousness, 384,387
Interim Committee, atomic bomb
decision and, 321
Interviewers' interactions, 181-183,
188-190,191-192
In the Devil's Snare: The Salem
Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
(Norton), 74
Invasion ofJapan: Alternative to the
Bomb (Skates), 335
Inventing America: Jefferson's
Declaration ofIndependence
(Wills), 97
Irish, John, 303-304
Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (Brigham),
447
Italian immigrants, 266-267,278. See
also Sacco and Vanzetti case
Jackson, Andrew
Abernethy on, 134-136
actions of, 130-131
arrival in Tennessee, 134-135
campaign imagery and, 233
four viewpoints of, 144-145
frontier lawyering of, 131-132,135
Indian destruction and removal by,
142-143
as laborer's friend, 137-140
land speculation by, 135
portrait of, 136
Schlesinger on, 13 7-140
Turner on passions of, 132-133
Jackson, Squires, 175
Jackson, William Henry, 215
Jacksonian America: Socie-iy, Personali-iy,
and Politics (Pessen), 147
Jacob A. Riis, Police Reporter (Ware), 226
Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen
(Alland), 203-204, 226
Jail-ins, 370
James, King of England, 37
Jamestown colony. See Virginia
Colony
Janet, Pierre, 61
Japan, bombing of. See Atomic bomb
decision
Japanese Americans, 303-304
Jaworski, Leon, 398-399
Jefferson, Thomas
in the Committee of Five, 76,77
contribution to downfall of slavery,
94-96
drafting of Declaration of
Independence, 78-80,384
drafting of Virginia constitution,
89-90
Edward Bancroft and, xxv
Enlightenment influences on,
87-89
"pursuit of Happiness" phrase of,
89,90
at Second Continental Congress,
76-77
on Silas Deane, xx
Jeremiah, Thomas, 93
Jews
as immigrants, 266
limitation of number in Harvard,
278
Nixon's anti-Semitism, 413-414
JFK (film), 403
Jim Crow laws, 366,383,390
John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Act, 403
John Indian, 53
John Lewis Krimmel (Harding), 122
Johns, Ralph "Ruffles," 367,
375-376
Johns Hopkins University, 126
Johnson, Andrew, 198
Johnson, Charles, 179
Johnson, Edward, 20

Johnson, Lady Bird, 403
Johnson, Lyndon B.
civil rights legislation of, 372,393
John Wayne and, 426
Pentagon Papers and, 408
on political demonstrations, 390
sculpture of, 402
secret taping system of, 400,
401,403
John the Painter, xxviii, xxx
Joughlin, Louis, 281
Journal ofNegro History, 179
Journey of Reconciliation, 379
The Jungle (Sinclair)
criticism of, 246
muckraking era and, 238-239
popularity of, 230,232
publication of, 236
Justice Department, civil rights
movement and, 391-392
Kaiser, David, 281
Kansas, Pottawatomie Creek attack
in, 155
Kaplan, Sidney, 97
Karabell, Zachary, 419
Karlsen, Carol, 70-72
Katzmann, Frederick
background of, 259-260
cross-examination by, 272
evidence presented by, 260-263,
274-276
Justice Department suspect list
and, 269
prejudice of, 271
Kellogg, Hannah Barnard
Hastings, 109
Kennan, George, 335
Kennedy,John F., 372,390,400-401
Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for
Justice (Rosenberg and
Karabell), 419
Kennedy, Robert, 328,391,401,422
Kennedy, Ted, 401
The Kennedy Tapes (May and
Zelikow), 419
Kevles, Daniel, 336
Keystone predators, 28-29
Kidder, Harriet, 104
INDEX 465
Kill Now, Talk Forever (Newby), 281
King, Admiral Ernest, 328-329
King, David, 156
King, Lonnie, 369
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
assassination of, 422
March on Washington (1963),
372,374,379,390,393
King Philip's War of 1676,69
Kissinger, Henry
Brookings documents and, 414
influence of, 328
on Nixon, 418
in taped conversations with Nixon,
405-406,407,415-416
Kitchens, 112,116
Kitchen settles, 100
Knights ofSpain, Warriors of the Sun
(Hudson), 30
Kodak cameras, 209,212-213,227
Kolko, Gabriel, 254
Koster, Samuel, 421
Kovic, Ron, 424-426
Krimmel,John Lewis, 103-108,109,
112-113,115,118-119,122
Kroeber, Alfred, 19-20
Krogh, Egil, 408-409
Kuhn, Thomas, 137,147
Kulikoff, Allan, 50
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 50
Kutler, Stanley
Abuse ofPower, 404, 419
on access to Nixon tapes, 402-403
on Brookings episode, 407,
408-409
Nixon tapes annotated by, 407-409
Nixon tapes transcribed by, 404-405
Kyoto, Japan, as possible bomb
target, 331
Labor movement, 267-268,304-307
Labor systems
agricultural tenant system, 294-296
apprentices and tenants, 44,46
contemporary slavery, 51
Duty boys, 44,45-46
labor contractors, 307
migrant agricultural labor, 295
servants, 45,46,48
slavery, 46-49 (See also Slavery)
466 INDEX

Ladies' Home Journal, 348 Lind,Michael,447

Ladson, Augustus, 188-190,192 Lineups,police,257,259
The Lancet, 238 Lippmann,Walter,412
Land,Edwin,227 Literacy tests,267,390
Land ownership and speculation Litwack,Leon,200
consolidation of agricultural Livingston,Robert,76,77
land,296 Locke,John,87
Eastern speculators,134 Lodge,Henry Cabot,236,250
freedpeople and,196-198 Lomax,Alan,201
"free land " and conquest of Indian Lomax,John Avery,179,201
lands,141 Lomax,Louis,370-371,372
Jackson and,135,142 Lopez,Braulio,304-305
Native Americans and,141-142 Lorimer,"Blond Billy," 246,
redistribution of southern lands, 247-249
197-198 Los Alamos,New Mexico,316-318,
role of free land in the frontier,133 320-321,325-328. See also
Lange,Dorothea,213,286, Atomic bomb decision
288-290,309 Lowell,Lawrence,278
La Salle,Rene-Robert Cavelier,Sieur Lowell mills, 115
de,18-19,26 Lue,Gim Gong,303
Las Casas,Bartolome de,14 Lukas,J. Anthony,419
Lasswell,Harold,348 Lunch at the 5 & 10 (Wolff),395
Laurens,Henry,93 Luper,Clara,379-381,384-385
Lawrence, Ernest, 313,321,327 Lusk,Milton,159
Lawrence and Oppenheimer (Davis),336
Lawson,Deodat,62,66-67 MacArthur,General Douglas,
Lawson,James,370,382,388,390 321,321n,329,332
Leach,George,159 MacLeish,Archibald,329
Leahy,Admiral William,328 Madison,James,93,94
Lee,Arthur,xviii,xxvi-xxvii Magic lanterns, 206
Lee,Richard Henry,77-78,84,87,89 Maier,Pauline,97
Lee,Robert E.,149 Maize corn,15
The Legacy of Conquest (Limerick),141, Major Symptoms ofHysteria Oanet),61
147 The Making of an American (Riis),
The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti 204,226
Ooughlin),281 The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Leisure,increasing,113 (Rhodes),335
The Letters ofSacco and Vanzetti Malaria,25
(Frankfurter andJackson),281 Maleficium, 54, 57-58
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt Malin,James,309
(Morison),254 Manhattan,historical population
Lewis,John,382,390-392 changes in,11,206
Lewis,Mercy,69 Manhattan Project. See also Atomic
Liberty and Power (Watson), 147 bomb decision
Liddy, G. Gordon,396 budget of,312,322
Life magazine,433,435 at Los Alamos,316-318,320-321,
The Life ofRiley, 350 325-328
Limerick,Patricia,141,147 New Mexico bomb test,310,
Lincoln,Abraham,95-96,150, 312,334
165,165n The Manhattan Project (Stoff et al.),335

Manipulative hypothesis,352-355,
362-363
Mann,Charles C.,30
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Berlin),50
Maples,Robert,432
March on Washington (1963),372,
390-393
The Marketplace ofRevolution: How
Consumer Politics Shaped
Revolution (Breen),122
Marling,Karal Ann , 364
Marriage, high rates after World War
II,346
Marshall,General George,316,329
Maryland,fear of slave insurrections
in,92,94
M*A*S*H (film),361n,435
Mason,George,90
Mason,Jimilu,402
Mass media
content analysis of women in,
353-355
historians not heavy consumers of,
352-353
manipulative hypothesis and,
352-355,362-363
portrayal of women in,347-350
reflection hypothesis and,351-352
"symbolic annihilation" of women
in,353-354,362
white male writers and producers
in,348-349,351
Mast,28
Material culture,98-122
clocks,109-111,118
in the current information
revolution,123
dating items,101-102
diaries and,102,104
dining habits,106-108
of elites,111-114
front yards,117-118
heating of homes,100-101,113,
118
historians' use of,101
home industry,115-116
household inventories and,102,113
houses,112-114,116-117,119
INDEX 467
identity construction through,
120-121
information sources on,102,113
Krimmel's painting and,103-108,
109,112-113,115,118-119
leisure and,113
of the middle class,114-119
quilting activities,103-106
textiles,104-105,115-116
women's cupboards,108-109,119
Mather,Cotton,70
Mather,Increase,56
May,Ernest,401,403,419
Mayer,Edith P.,226
McAdam,IJoug,377, 382-386, 395
McAnarney,Thomas and Jeremiah,
271,272
McCain,Franklin,366-369,373,
374-376
McGerr,Michael,254
McGillivray, Alexander, 143
McHale,Karen,365
McKinley, William,235,268
McNeil,Joseph,366-369,373,
374-376
McWilliams,Carey,309
Mead,Margaret,342
Meadlo,Paul,430-432
Meadows, Audrey,360
Measles, 25
Meat Inspection Act (1906)
Beveridge and,232,236,244-247
in conference committee,251
courts on,252
dating provisions of,247-248,
250-251
evaluation of final version,251-253
government expansion in,242-243,
247-248
head-fee funding of,244,247-248,
250-251
House passage of,247-251
labeling provisions in,245,247,
252
Neill-Reynolds report and,243-
244,245-246,248
Progressive reform context of,
238-241
Roosevelt's role in,243-244
sanitary conditions and,245
468 INDEX

Meat Inspection Act (1906)-Cont. Moebes,Jack,368

secretary of agriculture powers in, Monroe,James,142
245-246,248-252 Montgomery bus boycott (1955),374,
Senate passage of,244-246 379,383-384
as victory for packers,236 Mooney,James,19-20,24
Meatpacking industry Moore,Anzie,389
early government inspection of,232 Moore,Fred,271,272,280
European government ban on,236 Morelli,Joe,275
moving (dis)assembly line in, Morelli,Mike,275
240,241 Morgan,Edmund M.,273,281
profit margin in, 241-242, 247 Morgan,Edmund S.,42,49,50
rats and,230-232 Morgan,]. P.,268
role in weakening regulation, Morison,Elting,254
244-247 Morris,Aldon,387,395
sued under Sherman Antitrust Act, Mortality rate
237-238 slavery economics and,49
support for early meat-inspection of urban poor, 206
act,236-238 in the Virginia Colony,40,45,
voluntary compliance offers by, 47,49
244,246 Moscoso,Luis de,3,16,18
Medeiros,Celestino F.,275,281 Moses,Robert,368-369,389,391
Media. See Mass media Mothers-in-law,portrayal of,361-362
Medina,Ernest,421,432,439,444 "Moveables' " 109
Meltzer,Milton,309 Mowry,George,254
Memoirs, 1945 (Truman),335 Muckrakers, 238
Men,in television roles,354 Muhammad,Elijah,393
"Mending Wall" (Frost), 283 Myerowitz, Joanne, 364
Merwyn, Samuel,238 My Lai. See Son My
Mexican Americans,304-308 My Lai: A BriefHistory with Documents
Mexico border fence,282-283 (Olson and Roberts),447
MIAs (missing in action),441-442 My Soul Is Rested (Raines),395
Michaud, Gene,447 Myths
Mico, 15 American exceptionalism,426,435,
The Middle Ground (White), 143,147 440,445
Middle ground metaphor,143-145 definition of,425
A Midwife's Tale: The Life ofMartha "one-shot kill," 436,439
Ballard, Based on Her Diary tension between good and evil,
(Ulrich),122 444-445
"Migrant Mother" (Lange),289-290 visual images and,426-428
Migration chains,300
Milk industry, 240 NAACP. See National Association for
Millay,Edna St. Vincent,277 the Advancement of Colored
Mills,Gideon,159 People
Ministers ofReform (Crunden),254 Nader,Ralph,252
Miranda rights,259 Nagasaki,atomic bombing of,312,
Mississippean culture,15-16 331-333. See also Atomic
Mississippi Freedom Summer,389 bomb decision
Mitchell,John,396,412-413,414 Nash,Diane,382
Mitchell, Sam,171,196 Nashville, Tennessee, sit-ins in,
Models. See Theory 381-382,385

Nashville Christian Leadership
Conference (NCLC),382
Nast,Thomas,233,234
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP)
in Gillespie Park Golf Course
action,367
as influence on student activists,
374-375,385,388
legal successes of,379
at Raleigh convention,388
surprised by student actions,370-371
National Defense Research Committee
(NDRC),316,325
Nationalism, the frontier and,128
National Origins Act (1921),282
National Student Association,
388-389
A Nation Under Our Feet (Hahn),200
Native Americans
alteration of landscape by,7,27-29
Captain John Smith and,32,33-35
De Soto's interaction with,12-18
epidemics after European contact,
22-25
"free land" in frontier thesis and,
141-142
horses and,9,9 n
Jackson and removal of,142
precontact population estimates,
19-22
slaves owned by,143-144
weapons of,13-14
women leaders,15
Native Son (Wright),378
Nativism
anti-Asian,303
National Origins Act (1921),292
Sacco and Vanzetti and,265-266,
270-273
U.S.-Mexico border fence and,
282-283
Natural rights,85
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the
Great West (Cronon), 254
NCLC (Nashville Christian
Leadership Conference),382
NDRC (National Defense Research
Committee),316,325
INDEX 469
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
(Hughes), 374
Neill,Charles P.,243-244,
245-246,248
Nelson,Knute,236,246,251-252
Neumann,Thomas,27-29
Neurosis, witchcraft hysteria as,
60-61,125
Nevins,Allen,153,156
Newby,Richard,281
New England. See also Salem
witchcraft hysteria
Boston Port Bill,86
Christmas celebrations discouraged
in,86-87
Indian wars in,69
precontact population of,19-20
Newhall, Beaumont,226
New Republic, 278
Newton,Sir Isaac,87
"New western history," 140-146
"The New Woman and New History"
(Smith-Rosenberg),364
The New World: 1939-1946 (Hewlett
and Anderson),335
New York Sun, 210
New York Times, 246, 408
New York Tribune, 205-206
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon
Years (Lukas),419
Nimitz, Admiral Chester W.,332
Nissenbaum, Stephen, 65-68,74
Nixon,Patricia Ryan,411
Nixon,Richard
on access to tapes,402-403,414-415
anti-Semitism of,413-414
California governor's campaign
defeat, 411
Checkers speech of,410-411
discovery of tapes of,398-399
election as president,412
impeachment articles against,
398-399
installation of taping system by,
400,401-402
personality of,409-410
private persona of,412-414,
417-418
public persona of,410-412,417
resignation of,399
470 INDEX
Nixon, Richard-Cont.
in Senate investigation of
Watergate break-in,396-398
Six Crises, 414
speaking with tapes in mind,
415-416
transcription and interpretation of
tapes of, 404-409
Vietnam War and, 434
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990
(Ambrose), 419
Nixon: The Triumph ofa Politician
(Ambrose), 419
Nonviolent protest,370,388
Nordhoff, Charles,177
North Carolina. See also Greensboro
lunch counter sit-in
currency during the Revolution,
133-134
fear of slave insurrections in,92
segregation in,366,375,383
Northwest Ordinance (1787),95
Norton, Mary Beth, 69,74
"Not Charity But Justice" (Mayer),226
"Not Classes,But Issues" (Thelen),254
"A Note on Silas Deane's Death"
(Stinchcombe),xxx i-xxx ii
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender
in Postwar America
(Myerowitz),364
Now It Can Be Told (Groves),335
Nuclear Delusion (Kennan),335
Nurse, Rebecca,55,59-60,70
Nylander,Jane,102,122
Oates,Stephen,153,167,168
O'Dea, William Thomas,113-114
Oil industry,in the 1930s,296
Okies. See also Dust Bowl
as farmworkers in California,
305-308
hardships in camps,301-302
migration to California,286,
293-294,298-300
stereotypes of,307
Oliver, Susan, 364
Olsen,Gregory,444
Olson,James S.,447
On Active Service in Peace and War
(Stimson),335
Once Upon a City (Museum of the City
of New York),226
"One-shot kill" myth, 436,439
On Photor;raphy (Sontag),226
Opinion polls,292,343
Oppenheimer,]. Robert
on the first test explosion,334
as head of Los Alamos site,
316-318,327
previous involvement with
communist-front
organizations,326
on use of the bomb,320-321
Opper, Frederick,235,239
Oral testimony collection. See also
Slave narratives
by black scholars in the 1920s,179
distortions in,180
economy of deception and,
183-187,188-190
by Federal Writers' Project,
179-180,200
by Freedman's Inquiry
Commission,178
geographic imbalance in,180
interviewers' interaction and,
181-184,187-188,190-192
by the Lomaxes,201
objective conclusions in,192
of Okies journeying to
California,299
proper subjects for,202
transcribing dialect in interviews,
183-184
Grata, 15
Orciani, Riccardo,257
Organizational process model,
323-327
The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement (Morris),395
Orrery,86,88
Osbourne, Sarah, 54-55
Our Miss Brooks, 356-357
Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of
the New England Home
(Nylander),122
"The Packers and the People"
(Armour),255
Paine,Thomas,xxi,xxix

Paintings, as documentation, 103
Palfrey,John, 19-20
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 268-269,280
Paper currency, land speculation with,
133-134,135
Parent, Anthony,Jr., 50
Parkman, Francis, 18,26
Parks, Rosa, 379
Parliament, colonial opposition to,
85-86
Parlors, 112,116
Parmenter, Frederick, 256
Parris, Samuel, 53-54,67,68
Participatory democracy, 389
Passenger pigeons, 8,27-28
Peierls, Rudolph, 316
Peine fort et dure, 55
Peirsey, Abraham, 45
Pelzer, Louis, 261
Pennsylvania, 76-77, 92
Pentagon, building of, 326
Pentagon Papers, 407-408
Pessen, Edward, 147
Petticoats, quilted, 105
Phillips, Wendell, 169
Phips, William, 56
Phon, Pham, 431-432
Photographs of a Lifetime (Lange), 309
Photography, 203-226
cell phone cameras, 227-228
cumbersome early technology of,
208
as deceptive mirror, 207-208,225
detective cameras, 209
digital cameras, 227
discovery of, 207
family albums, 212-213
Farm Security Administration
photographers, 203,213-214,
286,288-290
Hine and, 203
interpretive choices in, 212-214
Kodak cameras, 209,212-213,227
Polaroid "Land" cameras, 227
Riis on, 204 (See also Riis,Jacob)
stereopticons, 206
Photography and the American Scene
(Taft), 226
The Physicists (Kevles), 336
Pigs, 3,10,25
INDEX 471
Pilgrims. See Salem witchcraft hysteria
Pinckney, Thomas, 198
Pizarro, Francisco, 6,23
Platoon (film), 442-445
Player, Willa, 374
Plessy v. Ferguson, 379
Pluralism, social movements and,
377
Pocahontas, 32,33-34
Point of view (POV), 35-36,420,431,
446
Polaroid "Land" cameras, 227
Political cartoons, 233,234,235
Political Process and the Development of
Black Insurgency, 1930-1970
(McAdam), 395
Polls, 292,343
Porringers, 107
Porter, Roy, 122
Post-mortem: New Evidence in the Case
of Sacco and Vanzetti (Young
and Kaiser), 281
Pottawatomie Creek attack, 155
Potted chicken ingredients, 232,245
Poverty, urban, 205-206. See also
Social classes
Powell,John Wesley, 215
Power in the Movement (Tarrow), 395
Powhatan, 33-35
Presentism, 140
Private property, in the Virginia
Colony, 39
Processed foods, 240
Proctor, Elizabeth, 56,58,68
Proctor, John, 56,63,68,275
Proctor, Redfield, 251
Proctor, William, 261-262
The Progressive Era (Gould), 254
The Progressive Historians: Turner,
Beard, Parrington
(Hofstadter), 147
Progressives, morality and, 239-241
Prompt and Utter Destruction (Walker),
335
Psychohistory, 158
Public Citizen, 402-403
"Pursuit of Happiness," 89,90
The Pursuit ofLiberty: A History of the
American People (Wilson), 67
Pyle, Howard, 47
472 INDEX

Quakers (Society of Friends),69-70 Richmond,David,366-369,373,

Quart,Leonard,447 374-376
Quigualtam tribe,3, 17-19 Richter,Daniel,21
Quilting activities,103-106 Ridenhour,Ronald,430
Quilting frames,115 Rights,English vs. natural,85
Quilting Frolic (Krimmel),103-108,109, Riis,Jacob. See also How the Other Half
112-113,115,118-119,122 Lives
biographies of, 226
Racism on Bohemian cigar makers,
economy of deception and, 217-218
175-178,181-183, 193-194 on children,220-221
in precontact population estimates, discovery of photographs of,203
20 early life of,206
television portrayal of,361n on family life,217-220
in war,439 "Five Cents a Spot" photograph,
of white northerners,177 210,211-212, 217
Railroads,243,266 photographic technology of,
Raines,Howell,395 209-210
Ramenofsky,Ann,21-22,24-25 on photography,204
Randolph,A. Philip,390,392 as police reporter, 205-206
Randolph,Joyce,360 relationship with poor,214-215,
Rational actor theory,314-315,318, 216
322 on sense of decay,223-224
Rawick, George P.,200 stereopticon use,206
Reagan,Ronald,440 tenement flames discovery,
Rebozo, Bebe,413 210-211
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished on urban crowding,221-223
Revolution (Foner),200 Riis,Roger William,203
Rediscovering Jacob Riis (Yochelson and Ripley,Harry,273,274, 280
Czitrom),226 The Rise ofthe New West (Turner),
Refinement,by elites,111-114 129,147
The Refinement ofAmerica: Persons, Rittenhouse,David,88
Houses, Cities (Bushman),122 Roberts,Randy,447
Reflection hypothesis,351-352 Rockefeller,John D.,268
Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), Rogers,Dan,254
226 Rogers,William, 328
Religion,of African Americans,178, Ragin,Michael,142
185-186 Rolfe,John,38,40,43,46
Remembering Slavery (Berlin),200 Roman,James,364
Remember My Lai, 447 Roosevelt,Eleanor,342
Remini,Robert,142 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano
Republican Party Agricultural Adjustment Act,296
condemnation of John Brown, cartoonists on,234
150, 157 death of,319,442
elephant symbol of,234 Fair Employment Practices
in meat inspection debate,250 Commission,390
Reynolds,David,153 Farm Security Administration,203,
Reynolds,James,243-244,245-246, 213-214,286,288-290,302
248 Federal Emergency Relief
Rhodes,Richard,335,338 Administration,296

Federal Writers' Project,
179-180,200
hidden microphone in desk of,
400
Jackson compared with,139-140
Manhattan Project and,315-316
as Palmer's neighbor,268
spending cuts by,301
television appearance of,349n
on unconditional surrender of the
Japanese,319
on use of the atomic bomb,320
Roosevelt,Theodore
on anarchists,268
early life of,229-230
on early meat inspection law,
238,246,248-253
The Jungle impact on,232
Nobel Peace Prize of,230
Rough Riders and,229,237
suit against meatpackers,237-238
"Roosevelt,Truman,and the Atomic
Bomb: A Reinterpretation"
(Bernstein),335
Root cellars,101
Roots ofReform (Sanders),254
Rosen,Ruth,364
Rosenberg,Jonathan,419
Rosenthal,Bernard,61-63,73,74
Rosie the Riveter,343,347
Rothenberg,Winifred Barr,122
Rough Riders, 229,237
Rules of Civility, 111
Runaway slaves,95,143
Russell,Francis,281
S-1 Committee. See Uranium
Committee
Sacco,Nicola. See also Sacco and
Vanzetti case
alibi of,261
arrest of,257
beliefs of,276
dynamite hidden by,280
on Justice Department suspect
list,269
life of,269-270
refusal to sign clemency plea,278
Sacco and Vanzetti (Watson),281
INDEX 473
Sacco and Vanzetti case,256-280
appeals of,274-276
arrest,conviction,and sentencing,
257-258,273
Braintree and Bridgewater crimes,
256-257
Bridgewater case sentence,260
clemency refusal, 278,278n
defense in, 261-262,271
evidence in Braintree case,
260-262,274-276
jury composition,272-273,274
Medeiros confession in,275,281
nativism and,265-266,270-273
public opinion and,258,268-269,
273,276-279
role of political beliefs in,
260,262-263,270
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist
Background (Avrich),281
Sachs,Alexander,315
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins
of Witchcraft (Boyer and
Nissenbaum),66,74
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of
1692 (Rosenthal),74
Salem witchcraft hysteria,52-74. See
also Witchcraft
in Andover,68
bewitchment at,53-57
conversion hysteria,60-63,64,125
in Gloucester,69
Indian wars and,69
"invisible world" in,57-63
as microcosm,52-53
occupations of accused witches,68
Quakers and, 69-70
role of young girls in,58-59
Salem Village vs. Salem Town and,
65-68
social context of,63-70
tangled web of interpretations of,
72-73
"women alone" and, 70-72
Salsedo, Andrea, 263
Saltonstall,Nathaniel,56
Samp,107
Sanders,Donald,398
Sanders,Elizabeth,254
Sands oflwo Jima (film),425-426
474 INDEX
Sandys, (;eorge,46
Sandys,Sir Edwin,38,40,42,44-45
San Francisco News, 309
Sanger,Abner,101,102
San Joaquin Valley,California,
300-302
Sash windows,113
Saturday Evening Post, 347,349
Savage,John,435-436
Scarlet fever,25
Schlesinger,Arthur,Jr.,137-140,
138n,145
Schlesinger,Arthur Meier,Sr.,
137-138,138n
Schulzinger,Robert,447
Science,trend to large organizations
in,312-313
SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership
Conference),370,379,
385,388
SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society),388
Sea Islands, South Carolina,172,
196-197
Second Bank of the United States,
139-140
Second Continental Congress,76-77,
79. See also Declaration of
Independence
Second Treatise on Government
(Locke),87
Selection,in writing history,31
Self Taught (Williams),200
Sellers, Cleveland, 368-369
Seminole Indians,144
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848,90
La Senora De Co:fitachequi,15
Servants,in the Virginia Colony,45,
46,48
Seward,William,150
Sex slavery,51
Shackleton,Elizabeth,121
Shahn,Ben,213,277
Sheen,Charlie,442
Sheen,Martin,440
Sheldon,Susannah,61-62
Sherman, (;eneral William,190,197
Sherman,Roger,76,77
Sherman Antitrust Act,237-238
Sherwin,Martin,321n,335
Shindo,Charles].,309
Shulman,Bruce,403-404,419
Sibley,Mary,53
"The Significance of the Frontier in
American History" (Turner),
124-125
Sigourney,Lydia,112
"Silas Deane: Death by a Kindly
Teacher of Treason?"
(Boyd),xxxi
Silbey,Frank,271
Silkworms,at Virginia Colony,37
Sill,E. N.,156
Silver Cities: Photography of Urban
America (Hales),226
Silverware,107,111
Simkins, (;eorge,367
Sinclair, Upton
Boston, 277
The Brass Check, 254
cartoonists on,234
The ]ungl� 230,232,236,
238-239,246
leaking Neill-Reynolds report,246
meat-industry magazine articles,238
on Sacco and Vanzetti,277,280
Six Crises (Nixon),414
60 Minutes II, 227
Skates,John Ray,335
Slater,Rexford,256
Slave insurrections,92-94,149,151
Slave narratives
distortions in,179-180
economy of deception and,
183-187,188-190
in Federal Writers' Project,
179-183,200
in Freedman's Inquiry
Commission,178
interviewers' influence on,
181-184,187-188,190-192
of Susan Hamilton,188-190
of Susan Hamlin,184-187
Slaveowners
deception of,175-178,176n
Native Americans as,143-144
Slavery. See also Slave narratives
British efforts to get support of
slaves,92-94
contemporary,51

deception in,175-178,176n,
183-190,193-194
Declaration of Independence and,
90-92
economics of,49
families in,186,187,189-190
Indian ownership of slaves,143-144
Jefferson's contribution to downfall
of,94-96
life expectancy in,180
literacy in,174-175
marriage in,189
master and slave relationship,
175-176,185-187,188-189
religion in,178,185-186
runaway slaves,95,143
slave demonstrations for liberty,
92-93
slave insurrections,92-94,149,151
slave names,48
slaveowners' surprise at freedpeoples'
reactions,193-194
slave reactions to Emancipation,
171-173,193-195
stereotypes of,176,194
Virginia Colony origins of,46-49
Virginia's tariff on importation of
slaves,91
whipping as punishment in,189,
191,194
Slavery Convention of 1926,51
Slavery Remembered (Escott),200
Slave Testimony (Blassingame), 200
Smallpox,23-24,25
Smith,Adolph,207
Smith,Captain John
accuracy of accounts of,32-35
early life of,31-32
A Generali Historie of Virginia, 31,32
Pocahontas and, 33-35
on slavery,47
on the Virginia Colony,37
Smith,Julia,101
Smith,Kelly Miller,370
Smith,Thomas, 38
Smith questionnaire,339-340
Smith-Rosenberg,Carroll,364
SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordination Committee),
372,388-392,394
INDEX 475
Social classes
frontier and,128,136
middle class material culture,
114-119,120-121
refinement in material culture,
111-114
urban culture and,137-138
Social movements. See also Civil rights
movement
causal sequence of origins of,
377-378
classical explanatory models of,377
diffusion theory,386
insurgent consciousness in,384,387
model of political process in
formation of,382-387
pluralism and,377
Son My
as aberration,434-435
attack on wrong hamlet,432-433
eyewitness accounts of,430-432,446
Platoon and,443-444
point of view in,420-421,431,446
punishment of Calley for,434
reported events at,421-422
Sontag, Susan,214,226
SOP (standard operating procedure),
324,332-333
South Carolina
fear of slave insurrections in,
92-93,94
Sea Islands, freedpeople in,172,
196-197
Union forces in,171
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC),370,
379,385,388
Southern University,Baton Rouge,179
Southwide Student Leadership
Conference on Nonviolent
Resistance to Segregation,388
Soviet Union
atomic bomb decision and relations
with,318,330
atomic bomb disclosure to
Stalin,322
postwar arms race with,320,
322,330
Spectral evidence,55,56
Spermaceti candles,113
476 INDEX

Splaine,Mary,260-261 Sweatshops,206
Sprague,Seth,107 Swift,Louis,244
Stairs,refinements in,113,116 Swift and Company,231. See also
Stalin,Joseph,322 Meatpacking industry
Stallone, Sylvester,440-441,442 "Symbolic annihilation" of women,
Stamp Act Congress,84-86 353-354,362
Standing stools,98-99,101-102 Symbols and symbolic language
Steagall,Mildred,401 campaign imagery,233
Steams,Harry,160-163,165 distortion from oversimplification,
Steinbeck,John 234-235
on the Dust Bowl experience, in meat inspection bill passage,248
284-285 by muckrakers,238
The Grapes of Wrath, 286-288,291, political cartoons and,233,234,
298-300,301-302, 235
307-308,309 simplification of situations by,
Their Blood Is Strong, 309 232-233,234
Stereopticons,206 Syphilis,24
Stevens,'Thaddeus,198 Szilard, Leo,315,322,325
Steward, Chief,259,269
Stewart,Michael, 256 'Tablecloths,107
Stimson,Henry 'Taft,Robert,226
On Active Service in Peace 'Takei, George,427
and War, 335 Taking Charge: The Johnson White
on atomic bomb target House Tapes (Beschloss), 419
selection,331 "'Taping History" (Shulman),419
on decision to drop bombs,322,329 'Tarr,Joel,254
telling 'Truman of atomic bomb, 'Yarrow,Sidney,395
320-321 'Tascaluza, 16-17
on the Uranium Committee,316 'Taylor,Paul,288,309
Stinchcombe,William,xxxi-xxxii 'Taylor,Samuel S.,181-182
St. John,Hector,129 'Telephones,changes in,123
Stoff,Michael,335 'Television
Stone,()liver,403,424,442 content analysis of women in,
Stoner's Restaurant,Chicago,378 353-355
StoryCorps,201 demographics of writers, 348-349
Stratton,Samuel,278 The Honeymooners, 355-356,
"Street arabs," 220-221 359-362
Structural strain,in social movement I Love Lucy, 357-359,359n
formation,377 Our Miss Brooks, 356-357
The Structure ofScientific Revolutions persuasion in advertising,351-352
(Kuhn),147 portrayals of women in,348-350
Student Nonviolent Coordination pregnancy in,359n
Committee (SNCC),372, sitcom roots in radio shows,355
388-392,394 "symbolic annihilation" of women
Students for a Democratic Society in,353-354,362
(SDS),388 Television: Technology and Cultural
Sully,'Thomas,136 Form (Williams),364-365
Sunkist,301 'Temporary Student Nonviolent
Susman,Warren,326 Coordinating Committee,
Swanton,John R.,11 388

Tenements, 204-205,219,221-223
Tenochtitlan, 22,23
Textiles, 104-105,115-116
Thayer, Webster
background of, 260
instructions to the jury, 263
on new evidence, 275
prejudice of, 264,271,274
retrial decision of, 274,275-276
sentencing by, 258,260
Their Blood Is Strong (Steinbeck), 309
Thelen, David, 240,254
Theory
bureaucratic politics model,
327-334
cultural evolution theory, 127
definitions of, 125
diffusion theory, 386
grand theories, 126,129-130,145
manipulative hypothesis, 352-355,
362-363
organizational process model,
323-327
questions raised by, 135-137
rational actor model, 314-322
reflection hypothesis, 351-352
replacement of, 145
shaped by the present, 139-140
small-scale theories, 126
use of multiple models, 333-334
There Is No School Like the Family
School, 119
Thomas, Benjamin (Count Rumford),
113
Thompson, Florence, 289-290
Thompson, Hugh, 446
Thompson, John, 207
Thompson, William, 271,275
Thompson's Restaurant, Washington,
D.C., 378
Thomson, Charles, 77
Thoreau, Henry David, 150
A Time for War: The United States
in Vietnam, 1941-1975
(Schulzinger), 447
Timekeeping, 109-111
Tisdale, Geneva, 368
Tituba, 53-54
Tobacco, in the Virginia colony,
36,41-42,43-44
INDEX 477
Tobacco and Slaves (Kulikoff), 50
Towne, Laura, 177
Tragabigzanda, Charatza, 32
Tragedy in Dedham (Russell), 281
Tresca, Carlo, 271
Trichinosis, 25
The Triumph of Conservatism
(Kolko), 254
Truman, Harry S. See also Atomic
bomb decision
concern with Soviet Union postwar
conduct, 319-320,330
decision-making routines of, 328
dismantling of recording
system, 400
on hearing bomb test results,
310-311
Interim Committee
recommendations to,
321-322
learning of the atomic bomb,
320-321
terms ofJapan's surrender,
319,329
Trumbull, John, xxii, 75,78
Tube of Plemy (Barnouw), 364
Tuchman, Gaye, 353-354,362
Tuileries, xxviii
Tula tribe, 17
Tuleramia, 25
Turner, FrederickJackson. See also
Frontier thesis of Turner
Abernethy on, 133-136
criticism of, 130
frontier thesis presentation,
125-129,126
onJackson, 132-133,135,145
naming of, 13 On
Schlesinger on, 138-139
success of, 129-130
Turner, Roy, 297
Tweed, William "Boss," 233
Tyler, Mary Palmer, 115
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 106,109,
122
Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America's Western Past
(Cronon et al.), 147
Underground Railroad, 151
478 INDEX
Under Western Skies: Nature and
History in the American West
(Worster),147
United States Supreme Court,refusal
to review Sacco and Vanzetti
case,274
United States v. Cudahy Packing Co.,
et al., 252
University of California at Berkeley,313
Upham, Charles,58, 60,65
Upstreaming,21
Uranium Committee (later S-1),
315-316,325
Urban culture,137-138
Urey,Harold,327
Urine mug,102,103
Vahey, George,271
Valdinoci, Carlo, 280
Vallandigham, Clement, 151
Vallely,Jean,437
Van Amburgh,Charles,261-262
Van Buren,Martin,137
Vance,Vivian,358
Vanzetti,Bartolomeo. See also Sacco
and Vanzetti case
arrest of,257
beliefs of,277-278,279-280
dynamite hidden by,280
onJustice Department suspect list,269
life of, 269-270
sentence for Bridgewater case,260
Vaux,Calvert,119
The Verdict of History: Sacco and
Vanzetti (D'Allesandro),281
Vietnam: A Television History, 447
"Vietnam: Good Soldiers"
(Aufflerheide),447
Vietnam: The Necessary War: A
Reinterpretation ofAmerica's
Most Disastrous Military
Conflict (Lind), 447
Vietnam Veterans Against the War,434
Vietnam War portrayal,420-447.
See also Son My
American exceptionalism in,426,
435,440,445
antiwar protests,422,424,434
Apocalypse Now, 435,439-441
Born on the Fourth ofJuly, 424
cinematic myths and,422-429
The Deer Hunter, 435-439
end of war,434
ethnic mix in,442-443
First Blood and First Blood, Part 2,
440-442
The Green Berets, 422-423,
425-429,435,442
M*A*S*H, 361n,435
as noble cause,441-442
no definitive victory and,429
Platoon, 442-445
point of view,420-421,431,446
Sands oflwo Jima, 425-426
Son My as aberration,434--435
Son My eyewitness accounts,
430-432,446
Son My reported events,421-422
Tet assault and,422
visual images,426-428
The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990
(Young),447
Virginia,European contact in,8
Virginia Colony
agriculture in,41
as boom country,42-46
constitution formation,89-90
founding of,37
governing of,37,39-40
historical theories and,125
labor systems in,44-46
land ownership in,38-39
Pocahontas andJohn Smith,33-35
slavery origins in,46-49
slave unrest in,93
starvation at,37-38,40
tobacco in,35-36,41-42,43-44
Voting Rights Act (1965),372,390
Wadsworth,James,246,247-249
Walken,Christopher,435
Walker,]. Samuel,335
Walker,Wyatt Tee,385-386
Wallace,Henry,316
Ware,Louise,226
Warner, Sam Bass,205,215,226
Warren,Mary,59
The Wars of Watergate (Kutler),419
 INDEX 479

Washington,George Willard,John,60n
on being watched,114 Williams,Abigail,53
copying maxims from courtesy Williams,Betty,53
books, 112, 114 Williams,Heather Andrea,200
sword appropriated in Harpers Williams,Juan,395
Ferry raid,149 Williams,R. Hal,335
on threat of slave insurrection,94 Willkie,Wendell,400
Washington,Lewis,149 Wills,Garry,87,89,97
Washington Post, 396 Wilson,James (agriculture secretary),
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in 243,252
a Revolutionary Age (Frey),97 Wilson,James (at Second Continental
Watergate scandal,396--419 Congress),77
annotated transcripts of tapes, Wilson,R. Jackson,67
407-409 Windows,112-113,118
articles of impeachment against Wing,Kwan,214
Nixon,398-399 Winthrop,John,71,426
discovery of tapes,398 Wiretaps,Nixon on,415-416
gaps in tapes,398-399 Wise,Henry,148,156,157
Nixon's installation of recording Witchcraft. See also Salem witchcraft
system,400--402 hysteria
private Nixon revealed on tapes, in Australian aborigines,60
412-416,417--418 conversion hysteria and,60-63,
public access to tapes,399--400, 64,125
402-404 as a crime,53
resignation of Haldeman and in Europe,56-57
Ehrlichman,417--418 forgiveness for,55-56
resignation of Nixon,399 fraud and,63
Senate investigation of,396-397 maleficium in,54,57-58
usefulness of tapes as evidence, punishments for,55
404--409 spectral evidence in,55,56
Watson,Bruce,281 "women alone" and,70-72
Watson,Harry L.,147 Witchcraft at Salem (Hansen),74
Wayne,John,422--423, 425-429, "Witch's tit " 54
'

435,442 Wolff,Miles,395
Weber,Devra,306,309 Women
Weeks,John,107 in the 1930s,343,348
Wentworth,Paul,xxiv,xxvi-xxvii birthrates after World War II,
Werowance, 35 346-347
West Indies,slavery in,49 content analysis of television and,
Westmoreland,General William,434 353-355
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Declaration of Independence
Female with the Mass Media and,90
(Douglas),364 Friedan on the "feminine
White,Richard,143-145,147 mystique," 339-342
White paint,117 gender roles in the twentieth
Whitney,Eli,115 century,345-346
Whittier,John Greenleaf,154 Hadley chests of,108-109
Wildlife,7-8,18-19,26-29 in The Honeymooners, 355-356,
Wilkins,Daniel,60n 359-362
480 INDEX
Women Cont
- .
housewife's workload,341
in I Love Lucy, 357-359,359n
inheritance by,71-72,109
media portrayals in the 195Os,
347-350
in Our Miss Brooks, 356-357
Smith questionnaire of,339-340
status in the early twentieth
century,343
"symbolic annihilation" of,
353-354,362
treatment of,during witchcraft
hysteria,70-72
"women alone" and Salem
witchcraft,70-72
in World War II, 343-345
Wood,Fernando,148
Woodson, Carter,179
Woodward,Bob,419
Woodward, C. Vann,168-169
Workers,343-345,346
A World Destroyed (Sherwin),335
World of Wonder, Days ofJudgment
(Hall),74
World's Columbian Exposition,
124,126
World's Congress of Historians and
Historical Students,124
The World Split Open (Rosen),364
World War II, 343-347. See also
Atomic bomb decision
Worster,Donald,141-142,144,
147,309
Wright, Richard,378
X,Malcolm,393
Xom Lang. See Son My
Yeardly,George,46
Yochelson,Bonnie,226
Young,Marilyn B.,447
Young,William,281
Young People's Socialist League,388
Zelikow,Philip,335,401,403,419
Ziegler,Ron,396
Zinn,Howard,371,372